The storage specialty

27.03.2006
For the past half-decade, it seems, networked storage has been expected to explode. "The Year of the SAN" was always just a few calendar flips away, analysts and vendors assured us.

Well, rearview mirrors are always more reliable than crystal balls, and many experts believe that 2005 was, in its own quiet way, the year of the SAN. Regulatory demands, wide acceptance of virtualization and an explosion of data have combined to bring respect, attention and dollars to the field of storage.

That's good news for IT professionals specializing in storage. Storage administrators' national average salary tops US$80,000, while senior administrators average more than $95,000. And some experts say those pay scales have grown 2 percent in the past six months alone -- a trend that shows no sign of leveling off.

If rising salaries and status lead technology workers to deem storage a career specialty, as has happened with security, it will be a new development. "You don't set out in your career to do storage," says David Foote, president of New Canaan, Conn.-based Foote Partners LLC. "It's not a sexy place, and until recently, there was no ROI you could point to."

Storage tasks used to be performed by Unix systems administrators, MVS experts with mainframe backgrounds or Windows wizards focused on the desktop. The evolution of these ad hoc groups into a dedicated storage team again mirrors trends in the security field, experts say. "At some point, you're doing so much work related to security or storage that it makes sense to put that in your title," Foote says.

All-around storage