System Administrator

**System Administrator**:
The University of Saskatchewan is a world leader in water and food security, vaccine development and infectious diseases, and human, animal, and environmental health. The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) division provides innovative and disciplined support and expertise as an integral part of ensuring USask becomes the university the world needs. The division is also committed to fostering a workplace culture that promotes diversity, collaboration, and professional growth.

USask provides employees many benefits such as flexible work arrangements; access to the university’s recreation services; ongoing professional development and mentorship and a comprehensive benefits and pension program.

**Primary Purpose**:
The System Administrator, Virtualization, Storage and Backups provides deployment and ongoing support and administration on ICT systems, including server virtualization, large storage systems, compute farms, backup servers, and tape libraries, which underpin the teaching, learning, research and administrative goals of the university. The System Administrator ensures that the compute, storage and backup resources are highly available, effectively administered, patched, secured, repaired and maintained. In consultation with the Systems team, the Systems Administrator guides the implementation of technical solutions to provide stable virtualization, storage and backup services to the University.

**Nature of Work**:
This position is involved in the effective design, operation and enhancement of the institutional virtualization environment, storage, compute farms and backup systems, including performing urgent maintenance on infrastructure, implementing advanced computing systems, highly available and redundant storage design, and long-term analysis on future directions for virtualization storage and backups.

The role will include hardware installation and maintenance and software installation and configuration. The System Administrator requires keen attention to detail and careful, measured action; as a primary administrator of virtualization on a large data storage system, there is considerable impact associated with errors that compromise data. The position requires the ability to work effectively both independently and as a collaborative team member, and to appropriately prioritize response to a wide variety of time-sensitive tasks. Periodic evening or weekend work is involved, which will be balanced with flex time considerations.

**Typical Duties or Accountabilities**:

- Ensure the reliability, performance, integrity, and security of the institution’s virtualization environment.
- Ensure the reliability, performance, integrity, and security of the institution’s storage systems and backup systems.
- Work collaboratively with colleagues to provide effective feedback on virtualization, storage and backup systems.
- Establish and maintain documentation and operating procedure that will be used by all other systems team members.
- Maintain accurate accounting of time and expenses on projects and assignments.
- Communicate progress and issues regularly with colleagues, stakeholders, clients and the ICT leadership team.
- Participate in the development of effective change management practices to optimize the benefits and minimize disruption to the Universities teaching, research and administration systems.
- Support team performance at a high level by effectively communicating expectations, providing feedback, and participating in coaching and mentorship.
- Participate in the proposal, discussion and execution of services.
- Ensure liability and risk are responsibly mitigated by remaining current with best practices and managing contract and licensing relationships, including making recommendations on auditing practices.

**Education**: A University degree in Computer Science. An equivalent combination of education and experience will be considered.

**Experience**:

- SAN storage, preferably at the Petabyte-scale.
- Enterprise Backup, preferably at the Petabyte-scale.
- Demonstrated ability to contribute to the design and implementation of new virtualization, storage and backup systems.
- scripting to automate routine tasks preferably using Python and/or PowerShell.

**Familiarity with**:

- management of the following Enterprise solutions:

- VMware vCenter, Veeam, Pure1, IBM Storage Protect or similar solutions
- datacenter networking, firewalling and physical connectivity.
- Knowledge of Dell and Lenovo Servers.
- Experience with iSCSI storage networks design and effective usage would be an asset.
- Recent work experience in system administration at a post-secondary institution, is an asset.
- Experience as a Unix administrator would be an asset.

**Skills**:

- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Effective interpersonal and communication skills both written and verbal.
- Proven ability to work on multiple projects and with competing priori