Daily Life of a Consultant Systems Engineer

Lets take a small journey in the life of a Consultant Systems Engineer.

Today was particularly rough.

Woke up at 5AM to be at work by 6AM.  The past two days I've been "dual fisting" training courses, one for Netapp and one for Dell Sonicwall (shudder).  The Dell is only a two day course and was just terrible.  It started at 8AM Eastern Time, today was the last day so I guessed that I should be punctual since I was two hours late yesterday due to the time zone difference and some scheduling confusion (I'm in Mountain Time).

I have to install a number of these "firewalls" next week for a customer in Central Washington so I figured I should at least get a rough idea of what i'm doing beforehand, though I've had the customer gear for a week or to and basically figured it all out already without the "training."  Dell is talking up this product line pretty heavy, until you ask what happens when you actually turn on some of the advanced UTM/CFS features of the boxes and enable SSL VPN and DPI.  I'm sure you can guess what I'm about to say.  Yep, the box falls over and begins to catch fire in a spectacular display of virtual death.

On TOP of that, I'm doing a Cluster Advanced Administration 5 day course for Netapp.  This one I actually care about.  I have a very large deployment of a mufti cluster setup next month, and I'm responsible for both the VMware portion of it and the Netapp portion of it. Need to pay attention here.

By necessity and desire, I'm primarily a mufti faceted systems engineer.  I focus generally on 3 tiers:  Storage, Networking, and Virtualization.  Put them together, and I call them "Infrastructure."  I'm also required to be a full pre-sales technical engineer, who's job it is to actually sell the product/services we are pitching to our customers after the sales rep has buttered them up with warm fuzzy bullshit about the fantastic toast whatever pizza box piece of gear we are proposing to them makes.

Since my training courses are "virtual," it means I'm in the office.  We all know what happens here.  Inevitably, you end up getting maybe 15 minutes of uninterrupted attention on the training, and the rest of the day you are writing SoW's (Scope of Work), talking to customers during emergencies and generally being bothered by nuisance sales reps on shit that really can (and should) wait.  Oh well.

By the time I left work at 6PM I'd done 3 SoW's for 3 different potential and current clients for work ranging from a simple network assessment check to a 9 month network security staff augmentation, two training courses (at the same time), remotely configured 3 Juniper SRX's for new VPN sites for a client, and taken care of some personal financial business.  When looked at it through the lenses of "man hours,"  I think i pulled a 28 hour day in the span of 12 hours.

I'm actually not complaining.  I love my job, sometimes not my company, but I love my job.  New projects all the time, training whenever I want it usually, and generally pretty good perks (we have a keg in the break room).  Time to go at it all over again tomorrow.

/Signing off.