This morning I gave two weeks notice to my current employer, a Kansas City based VAR, where I have been a senior data center engineer for the last six years.

I’ve enjoyed many aspects of my current role; becoming certified in new technologies, learning new skills, and solving problems for customers. I’ve had the pleasure to work with a lot of talented people within the organization and within our partners… and of course, with our customers.

Looking through my documentation folders, it appears I’ve worked with at least 242 different customers on technology implementations. Some of these have been single day, one and done type customers. They needed a VNX, so I stood it up for them, and I never talked to them again. But really, many of these have been customers that I’ve had the pleasure of serving as a trusted advisor, where I can not only help guide them through infrastructure changes, but also build relationships. I will absolutely miss working with them on a daily basis.

There have also been other countless service tickets, some in the wee-hours of the morning, where I’ve helped people recover data or reassemble failed infrastructure. Some of those sleepless nights I might miss a little less.

I have been both lucky and challenged to travel a lot in my current role. Growing up and living in the Kansas City area my entire life, it was fun to be able to go to Boston, Seattle, San Fransisco, Austin, Atlanta, D.C., etc., for projects and training. Even the less glamorus places like western Illinois, northern Arkansas, eastern Oregon, or southern Tennesse could be fun for a while. While the travel schedule was not as aggressive as some in our industry endure, it was starting to became more than I wanted keep up with. Having two young children, and wanting to be always be present in their activities has been getting harder and harder.

I also reached a point a couple of years ago where I wanted to go a different direction in my career. I like to brag to people that I was a system administrator at age 13 and I became a consultant at 27, but I’ve always basically been the guy pushing the buttons and turning the screws to make things work.

My new role will be back on the customer side, but this time in a much larger enterprise than anything else I’ve really worked in before, and now my role will be a more strategic, architecture focused role. I’ll be working within the company business units to standarize systems, define technical requirements for projects, and act as a liason between the development, business and operations teams. I won’t be abandoning my experience as a virtualization, storage, and core infrastructure guy, I will be leveraging it to also get out of that comfort zone. I will be able to really focus on being the trusted advisor, within the organization, and less on pushing boxes into racks.

It will be a major change for me, and a new type of challenge, but it is one that I’m excited to be making.