At IT-training school MyComputerCareer, Russ Munisteri, program chair, lead instructor, and former systems administrator, teaches IT and gets learners on a path to achieving certifications. But a cert on the latest and greatest tech may not come in handy if your first employment gig has lots of old servers, hardware, and software.
“What happens if somebody gets hired with modern-day certifications, but they’re walking into a legacy network? It happens all the time, because of money, and budgets, and people don’t like change,” Munisteri told us. “IT certifications are great. They get your foot in the door. They really teach you all the foundations that you need out there. But once you get on the job, that’s when you have to start to learn that company’s network.”
Munisteri spoke with us about lessons learned as orgs move from old to new tech, and all the different ways to learn on the job.
These responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Do you have any examples from your career that demonstrate a situation involving legacy hardware and having to address it?
Servers and operating systems get older. So, a very common situation: running maybe a critical business app on an old Windows Server 2008. Over time, that server would start to crash now and then. As time builds, as the databases grow, the hardware cannot keep up with the software…We bought about six to eight months of time by adding some physical RAM, just to keep the server going so it didn’t crash. And then from there, we came up with a nice, detailed budget plan to move from legacy to something more modern.
What strategies speed up that kind of upgrade?
Research. A big part of being in information technology is your ability to troubleshoot and to research. Every company has their problems, right? But when it comes to specific situations, speak to tech support; tech support becomes your best friend. If your company is paying for a solid support contract with Microsoft or whomever, those folks become very close, because they know their stuff, and they’re there to guide you to move to the next level and follow industry best practice.
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When cost is a factor in keeping some of this old hardware around, what upgrade strategies are helpful?
Proper planning is huge. Communication is huge. Having your three- to five-year plans is very, very important. You can’t always think about now when it comes to IT. Always think “the future.” Always think “growth.” If you need to have one server today to run a website, think about buying three servers.
What else is important for the IT professional to get right in an upgrade situation?
Try to have a separate testing environment for yourself. You can build that out on your own desktop, making sure you have different versions and specific technologies at hand in your testing environment; you can play around with it, so you can learn it. You never want to learn on any production environment, because that could be a bad day for everybody…Have some of that legacy equipment there. It doesn’t matter whether it’s virtualized or not. Just be familiarized with it, because you never know when that knowledge is going to surface, and you’re gonna have to use it. I can remember I had all different types of virtual machines installed on my desktop: [Windows] Server, 2003, 2008, 2012. I had it all so I knew how to work with them when I had to. A lot of it comes down to just self-learning.