IBM Systems

My apprenticeship at AMETRAS dms managed service GmbH was built around IBM systems. Three years as an apprentice IBM Systems Engineer working with DB2, SAN storage, firewalls, backups, and switches.

That's where I learned what enterprise reliability actually requires: backups you've tested restoring from, storage that's provisioned with headroom, and databases where a schema change gets planned, not improvised. DB2 administration taught me to think carefully before I touch data; SAN and storage work taught me that capacity planning is a real skill, not an afterthought.

One of the things I'm proudest of from that apprenticeship: I built the monitoring setup myself. My supervisor scoped what needed watching — disk space, main processor load, VPN connections — and I wrote the scripts that gathered the data and formatted it for Nagios and Naemon to consume, then implemented the whole pipeline. More on that on the Monitoring & Alerting page.

It's a different world from the smaller, faster-moving projects I build outside of work, but the discipline carries over.