Storage Skills Still Lag

NEW YORK -- IT managers could be in for a tough time recruiting storage networking specialists next year. Indeed, it looks as if there's a full-blown storage skills gap in many organizations worldwide.

This was the warning from users and experts attending the "CIO Bootcamp" event at the Interop trade show today. The event served as a sort of professional therapy session for put-upon IT execs.

The need for high-density storage management skills is going to affect everybody,” said one IT manager from a California-based broadcasting firm, who asked not to be named. The exec admitted that his company was forced to turn to outside contractors to build out its storage infrastructure.

The former CIO of a New York-based retail firm, who also asked not to be named, agreed that firms still face a storage skills challenge. “Across the board, I think there is definitely a lack of new skills coming onto the market,” he said.

The ex-CIO added that this is particularly an issue in the Big Apple. “In New York you’re competing with the big financial services firms for talented headcount, so it’s tough to compete financially,” he explained.But even firms in the financial sector find getting hold of storage gurus to be a challenge. Bruce Barnes, the former CIO of Nationwide Financial Services and a panelist at the event, told Byte and Switch that storage, like other pieces of the enterprise infrastructure, has an image problem. “Because that’s the part of the iceberg that’s under the sea, it’s not as sexy,” he said. “But it’s still important.”

Barnes, who is now the CEO of consulting firm Bold Vision, admitted that he, too, struggled to hire enough storage staff during his spell as a CIO. “Often-times we had to supplement what we had in-house and procure talent from the vendor community or other specialty firms,” he explained.

SAN staffing issues have dogged users for some time. Earlier this year, consulting firm Robert Half Technology cited networking, including storage-related networking, as the hottest area in technology recruitment. (See Users Share SAN Staffing Struggles and CIO Survey Forecasts Stable Hiring.)

Against this backdrop, the Storage Networking Industry Association, the Data Management Institute, and a host of vendors such as CA have already made moves to bolster storage skill levels. (See CA Offers SNIA Courses, Toigo Launches Data Management Institute, and SNIA Training Goes to Midwest.)

But not every IT manager attending today's CIO Bootcamp was nervous about hiring storage staff. “I really don’t think that it’s going to be that big an issue,” said Jayson Hahn, CIO of Caldwell, N.J.-based Merrimac Industries. He sees the needed expertise as easily adaptable from other engineering skill sets. “Any network administrator can handle any storage needs that are out there.”Ben Marshall, systems architect at medical manufacturer KCI in San Antonio, told Byte and Switch that he is already planning a storage recruitment push. “Right now we’re using our Unix administrators as storage administrators,” he explained. “My plan is to break that team up and hire some storage experts.”

Marshall is not convinced this is going to cause him sleepless nights. “I have got a good personal network with a lot of large enterprises -- so I don’t know if there’s going to be a problem finding those skills.”

Another IT manager, from a New York-based financial firm, who asked to remain anonymous, felt that talk of skills shortages is overblown. “The biggest problem with storage is how to get users to understand that storage is not unlimited,” he grumbled.

Hahn agreed that end-users can be problematic. “Home PCs now have such huge hard drives, so people think they can have as much storage as they want at work.”

— James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: