Fueled in part by Web 2.0 demands of video, pictures and e-mail, as well as data-mining trends and compliance legislation, an exponential growth in storage has created an insatiable need for IT professionals who can successfully manage enterprise-wide data. By 2012, EMC predicts the industry will be short 1 million workers.

Data Center"Most of our customers need to augment storage, since data demand is getting larger and more complex," says Gary Shoemaker, business development manager for the company's state and local government division. "Since there's so much data to sort and different kinds of data such as images, video and voicemail, overall data is growing beyond what any data storage professional can handle."

While EMC and other vendors provide data automation and cloud computing services to ease the burden of data storage management, data management professionals like capacity planners and systems architects are in very high demand now and will continue to be in the coming years.

Since storage infrastructures are generally designed toward data archiving, data access and protection of critical data, data storage professionals should have experience with backups, provisioning, archiving, replication and compliance, says EMC. Other in-demand skills include IT infrastructure management and disaster recovery, according to research firm Gartner. 

"(Storage professionals) need to understand application requirements, performance and availability perspectives," says Stanley Zaffos, research vice president for Gartner. "And because now there's focus on the server level, they need to better understand business needs, recovery time and recovery point objectives, capacity growth and managing assets."

Data storage professionals should also have a skill set that evolves with data automation, including knowledge of new storage technologies like data deduplication and virtualization.

There's also a high demand for consultants who can analyze a company's storage needs and recommend appropriate data automation and virtualization tools. EMC, EDS and other companies employ large numbers of storage architects that perform data storage analysis.

For training, SNIA offers the Storage Networking Certification Program and EMC offers the EMC Proven Professional Certification Program. Dice Learning has a wide list of courses available. Just search on "Storage".

-- Chandler Harris