The Hunt for Storage Skills

Computerworld - Like many other IT workers, Jesse Gilleland was laid off this summer. But unlike lots of other IT professionals, he landed a new job in less than three weeks.

Gilleland credits his three years of enterprise-level storage experience for the quick resolution. He's now a senior systems engineer at Communications Technology Systems Inc., an IT services firm in Roswell, Ga., where he recently configured several storage pools on various types of EMC Corp. hardware that can be used in a Web server farm or disaster recovery system.

"There are very few people who are storagecentric," he says. "It's a good niche market to be in."

Indeed, three years' experience is more than most candidates have, according to Arun Taneja, an analyst at The Enterprise Storage Group Inc. in Milford, Mass. A lack of widely accepted, vendor-neutral training and the fact that storage technology is advancing so quickly means that people with "quality storage skills are scarce," Taneja says.

As a result, companies are unable to fill storage administrator positions and are often forced to make storage just one aspect of a systems or network administrator's job, he says.

But that's changing. Not only are companies continually taking in data from e-commerce sites, but massive IT projects in enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management also require and generate large amounts of data to be useful. Someone must manage the accompanying data storage, Taneja says, adding, "You can't run away from it."

Of the 47,000 open jobs listed at online job board Dice.com, 1,500 request storage skills and 900 of those call for storage management knowledge, says a spokeswoman at Dice Inc. in New York.

Tracy Reed says his experience as a Unix systems administrator makes him well prepared to handle the heavy-duty storage needs of his company, MP3.com Inc. in San Diego. An online music site, MP3.com has 70 to 80TB of data to store and move as Internet visitors download songs.

"A big part of managing large disk arrays is managing the allocation of the storage and managing the hardware, then choosing the right way to lay out how the data is stored for your application to get good performance," Reed explains. "These are things a Unix systems administrator will have been familiar with."

Reed says he does most of his work on equipment from Storage Technology Corp. in Louisville, Colo.

Knowing about storage makes him more marketable, Reed says. "I've not been scouting around, but I do get a lot of headhunters calling me up," he says.

To get around the lack of qualified professionals, Mike Donohue Jr., vice president of IT at Techies.com Inc., an online recruiting firm in Bloomington, Minn., has contracted with his vendor, Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, to provide all service on his site's storage-area network (SAN) gear. He says he hasn't even tried to find staffers with extensive storage backgrounds.