As companies are diving deeper into virtualized storage projects, IT managers are getting a better understanding of the staff skills they need to make those projects succeed. The exact talents required depend on the type of storage implementation, but most employers say they're in the market for two kinds of IT worker: technicians with vendor-specific SAN or NAS knowledge, and systems administrators and IT architects who understand the complexities and interdependencies among applications, operating systems and I/O, all of which affect storage requirements.

But the different approaches to storage virtualization demand different skills. For example, IT organizations that have created virtual server farms have typically relied on storage professionals who are knowledgeable about the types of platform being used and how best to allocate storage for those configurations, says Vincent Franceschini, chairman of the Storage Networking Industry Association in San Francisco.

That's one reason why IT leaders and industry observers say systems administrators and IT architects have skills that can help organizations manage storage virtualization efforts. Workers with such backgrounds are typically adept at configuration management and understand how storage, or "block," virtualization interrelates with disciplines such as disaster recovery planning and server clustering, says Irwin Teodoro, director of engineering at Laurus Technologies Inc., a systems integrator in Itasca, Ill.

What's needed is targeted instruction in how virtualization works.

For example, IT professionals who want to get involved with storage virtualization "need to know how the operating systems treat disk or what the disk limitations are to be successful in this environment," Teodoro says. Plus, systems administrators "are familiar with some form of data storage layout, and what you find is that 80% to 90% of storage administrators have backgrounds in systems administration," he adds.

The importance of those technical and process interrelationships in storage virtualization efforts also helps explain why there's strong demand for IT professionals who have ITIL process-transformation experience, says Brian Brouillett, vice president of data center services at Hewlett-Packard Co.

Homegrown Talent

Meanwhile, IT organizations crafting their own virtualized storage environments often use their existing SAN or NAS technologies and draw on IT staffers who are experienced with them, says Rick Villars, an analyst at market research firm IDC. Employees who are adept at tuning system performance and optimizing system utilization can help make those technologies more cost-effective in a virtualized environment, he says.

For at least some members of Share, an IBM user group, the goal is to simplify their organizations' virtualization efforts as much as possible "so you don't have to go out and find a storage virtualization expert," says Robert Rosen, a past president of Share and CIO at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases in Bethesda, Md. Instead, many IT managers are opting to tap "well-rounded" systems administrators who can be trained, Rosen says.

That might also be a more financially prudent approach. According to David Foote, chief research officer at management consultancy Foote Partners LLC, the average base pay for senior SAN administrators in the U.S. is $96,478. Foote Partners doesn't classify storage virtualization as a separate job category because those tasks are typically a component of what a SAN administrator does, says Foote. Nevertheless, IT professionals with such skills have commanded a 6.7% compensation increase over the past six months, he says.

Foote says employers prefer to develop their own IT staffers with virtualization skills -- including those with sought-after security and networking acumen -- instead of hiring contractors. That's partly because contract workers with such skills "don't come cheap," he notes.

Although most employers look for technicians with specific types of storage and virtualization expertise -- including iSCSI and Fibre Channel experience -- having a solid storage management background is a critical asset, says Babu Kudaravalli, senior director of operations for the business technology services division at National Medical Health Card Systems Inc. (NMHC) in Port Washington, N.Y.

"It's a very laborious and manual process to deploy storage," he says. "You have to have an expert or experts who absolutely know what they're doing to manage the storage."

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