Without prejudging the competition in any way, the following stands out as a very strong Sysadmin of the Year nomination. Hans Delbruck is not the nominee’s real name, of course, and we invite readers to send their guesses on why we used it as an alias for this philanthropist and saint among sysadmins.
My SysaAn Exdmin is a Rock Star because…
I’d like to nominate [Hans Delbruck] for Sys Admin of the Year. To start with, [Hans] is an avid learner. He completed several of his certifications on his own by reading books, articles, and forums. He also spreads his knowledge; he’s the go-to person when the junior team members need guidance or help and he’s always available to answer questions whether it is from a senior server team member or an up-and-coming help desk technician. Even though [Hans] keeps a heavy workload he continually takes the time to help mentor and make suggestions to others about their projects and tasks. [Hans] is continuously working after hours to resolve and work on business critical applications in our client environments, and he always displays an active interest in improving our clients’ IT environments and is always eager to encourage others to make suggestions for improvement.
[Hans] has a long track record of helping clients save time and money. For example, he was working on a project to reduce one company’s total cost of ownership regarding the purchases of hard disks for their SAN. This company had paid consultants to install and setup the SAN originally months prior. The client was not happy with the performance as well as the fact that they had to constantly purchase additional hard drives to improve performance. [Hans] worked diligently to get an evaluation SAN on site and set it up in a new configuration with a reduced number of disks, sufficient hard drive space to cover the client for 2-3 years growth and with increased performance of the system. The end result was [Hans] was able to save the company [a significant amount of money] in hardware and support purchases over the next 3 years.
[Hans] is a very skilled troubleshooter and often comes up with “out of the box” solutions. A memorable example occurred during a data center move for a client a few months ago. One of the servers was badly damaged during transit and refused to boot up. Of course, it was the most important server to the client’s operations! The client desperately needed the data. Unfortunately, you can’t just plug a RAID 5 set into a different server and have it work. After an hour of fruitless troubleshooting, [Hans] decided to “Frankenstein” the server. He found another server with a similar motherboard, placed it next to the broken server, and moved the daughterboard holding the RAID Controller to the new server. With the hard drives still pulling power from the broken server but plugged into the daughterboard in the new server, [Hans] was able to boot up the new server and retrieve the data! We have a picture of this “Frankenstein” server, and it truly saved the day for our client.
In conclusion, I believe that [Hans’] drive, initiative, go-getter personality, and troubleshooting skills make him the Sys Admin of the year. At the very least, he’s my company’s Sys Admin of the year!
