Mainframe and Data Center Storage Administrator

Founded in 2003, IT Concepts’ core values – customer-centricity, teamwork, driven to deliver, innovation, and integrity – ensure we work together to be the best, realize objectives, and make a positive impact in our communities. We intentionally created and sustain our ITC culture that embraces change, experimentation, continuous learning, and improvement. We bring our design thinking problem solving approach that challenges assumptions, prioritizes curiosity, and invites complexity to deliver innovative, efficient, and effective solutions. As we continue to grow in the support of our government customers, we are looking for driven and innovative individuals to join our team.

IT Concepts is seeking a Mainframe and Data Center Storage Administrator who will support several projects at a federal agency. The position is located in Woodlawn, MD. The qualified candidate should have strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills with sharp attention to detail.

What will you be doing?

Enhance Mainframe Storage

• Devise storage management and business resilience standards for systems, subsystems, SMS constructs, volume serial numbers, hardware, network components, backups, data replication groups, backup schedules, snapshots, electronic vaulting, etc.
• Create or enhance storage management and business resilience processes, and technical procedures.
• Use electronic services ticketing system to manage incidents and changes.

Implement space management

• Design, build/re-engineer, test, deploy, and document both Storage Management System (SMS) and non-SMS system storage space for each Sysplex.
• Implement, test, and document SMS data class, management class, storage group, storage class, and Automatic Class Selection (ACS) updates based upon change requests.
• Solicit approvals from customer managers for changes.
• Utilize the IBM TSO and ISMF technologies to modify the SMS constructs and ACS code.
• Test the changes before activation into the production environment.
• Document all updates and interact with the customer submitting the change request to ensure the actions meet their needs.
• Construct the BMC Mainview Storage Resource Manager and Dell EMC Unisphere infrastructure to perform storage monitoring, analysis, and management.
• Establish and document processes to configure/manage media meta-data, SMS pools/constructs, thin provisioning pools, data replication containers, unused space reclamation, etc.

Provide customer support

• Provide assistance to customers on:
  • Storage provisioning, backup, and recovery needs,
  • z/OS DASD and tape volumes requirements,
  • access methods,
  • use of IBM’s Job Control Language (JCL), IBM’s dataset utilities, IBM’s Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF), and IBM’s Access Method Services (IDCAMS) tools to manage datasets,
  • primary and secondary allocations for both basic and extended-format data sets,
  • dataset retention based upon the management class policies established in SMS,
  • catalog services for submitted change requests using the IBM IDCAMS and Rocket Software TREX tools.
• Research and develop recovery approaches for potential failure scenarios that meet the customer Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) objectives.
• Analyze the root cause of backup and data replication failures/exposures. Design practices and deploy technologies to eliminate data loss exposure. Design, build, test, and deploy automation mechanisms that minimize RPO and RTO.
• Work with customer teams and 3rd party vendors to devise business resilience infrastructure and practices to meet application and database requirements.
• Design and engineer detailed plans and scripts for disaster recovery exercises, disaster recovery events, and moving Sysplexes between data centers.
• Transfer skills to other storage administrators.
• Execute the procedures in disaster recovery exercises.
• Analyze issues and resolve them via technology and/or process enhancements.
• Design, document, and train storage administrators in data restoration processes

Implement infrastructure and process design

• Analyze the operating posture of the existing storage hardware and software. Plan, design, test, and deploy enhancements, new infrastructure, and technical processes to meet expanding workloads, exploit new technologies, improve operational functionality and efficiency, and protect the integrity and resilience of the customer’s data. Specific tasks include:
• The administrator shall design the following:
  • Virtualized provisioning pools/processes and automated tiering policies.
  • SMS pools, constructs, ACS code, HSM parameter libr