Sr. Storage Administrator

About the role

Position Summary: The Senior Storage Administrator is responsible for the reliable day‑to‑day operation, maintenance, and optimization of enterprise storage services across on‑premises and cloud environments. The role ensures that storage platforms operate securely, efficiently, and in compliance with university standards and regulatory requirements. The Senior Storage Administrator implements established service patterns, maintains configuration baselines, performs advanced troubleshooting, and drives continuous improvement in operational processes. They provide mentorship to colleagues and coordinate with infrastructure, security, networking, and application teams to support academic, research, and administrative workloads.

About The Work Unit: Vanderbilt University Information Technology is a human-centric organization that advances our university by delivering innovative solutions and frictionless experiences through collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Manage daily operations of SAN, NAS, and cloud‑based storage platforms, including provisioning, access management, zoning/masking, performance tuning, and lifecycle tasks.
• Maintain and apply operational configuration standards, runbooks, and procedure updates to ensure consistency and reliability.
• Perform routine system health checks; validate firmware and code levels; coordinate maintenance windows and system updates.
• Maintain accurate asset inventories, logical/physical mappings, and storage utilization records.
• Monitor storage health and performance using established tools and escalation thresholds.
• Serve as the primary escalation point for complex storage incidents; lead root cause investigations within defined architecture.
• Implement corrective and preventive actions to reduce repeat incidents and improve service stability.
• Contribute to operational resilience by participating in disaster recovery testing, failover exercises, and backup validation.
• Execute and improve data protection processes, including snapshots, replication, and backup/restore operations aligned with RPO/RTO requirements.
• Apply and monitor security controls for storage platforms, such as access permissions, encryption policies, key management practices, and audit logs.
• Ensure compliance with applicable university policies, data classifications, and regulatory frameworks (e.g., FERPA, HIPAA when applicable).
• Assist with evidence collection for audits and security assessments.
• Provide advanced operational support to application, research computing, virtualization, and database teams for user provisioning, performance investigations, and capacity needs.
• Develop, maintain, and enhance operational documentation,