BANGALORE, INDIA: Storage industry is witnessing an unprecedented growth of data and this in turn is calling for the need to manage it.

The industry, which bid adieu to the era of gigabytes, has today started weighing its information lot in zettabytes, where one zettabyte equals to one trillion gigabytes!

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IDC estimates that total amount of digital information created in 2010 will be 1.2 zettabytes. Moreover, in five years, the digital universe in India will grow over eight-folds.

Studies say that while 70 percent of the information in the digital universe is created by individuals, 85 percent of this information will managed by organizations, who will be responsible for security, privacy, reliability and compliance. The same holds true in India.

Now, when so much time and effort has been spent in creating it, it is high time to invest equal or even more to manage this information lot.

This is where the importance of storage professionals come in. Although, we have a heard a lot about computer professionals, or networking professionals and many others, we are not much familiar with storage professionals.

This unawareness explains the dearth of storage professionals in the industry today.

Alok Shrivastava, sr. director, EMC Education Services, US, in an exclusive interview with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, talks about the growing need to nurture storage professionals, especially when networking and storage spaces are merging.

CIOL: What is EMC Educational Services?

Alok Shrivastava: EMC Educational Services is a part of EMC, which is responsible for sales and technical training.

It undertakes all sort of associated programmes on certification, learning partner alliances, academic alliances etc. It comprises of about 350 individuals worldwide, including design, development, and operation.

It has 20 centres spread across the world, and also has partner locations. Overall, it delivers training classes to 70-80 instructor led classes. Today, over 400 universities across the world have included open curriculum.

In India EMC Educational Services works with 150 colleges and has 19000 students, who are part of its open curriculum on storage technology.

CIOL: Why is there a need for storage professionals?

Alok: Information or data is the fastest growing space in IT. People are are creating more and more information and all these information, such as e-mails, pictures, videos, social media interaction, need to be stored, protected and managed.

This growing information lot is calling for storage professionals, Today, you need people who are capable of managing and storing information.

When we started four years back the only people who knew about storage technology were the ones who learned on the job.

Storage technology is hardly included in any standard curriculum of computer technology. The level of appreciation of the importance of storage technology and its sophistication is lacking in academia.

During the last four years, we have been trying to create awareness in the academia about the importance and sophistication of the technology.

CIOL: So how successful have been these awareness drives and has the industry opened up for storage graduates?

Alok: There is still a wide gap between the industry and academia. It will take a sometime to see a large scale change. However, these initiatives are definitely bringing in some changes in the way it looked at storage graduates. 

Back in 2006, where only one-third of the companies were open to consider college graduates for storage, today the number has gone up by two-third.

CIOL: EMC is today working along with networking company Cisco. So what is this partnership pointing at and what could be the challenges for storage professionals going forward?

Alok: Technology boundary between storage and networking is gradually blurring, especially inside data centres. Storage and  networking are coming closer. Storage managers are expected to know networking as well as processing and at the same time are supposed to be well versed with management tools as well.

In future, storage industry will be looking for not just management and operating skills, but also strong designing and architecture skills in its storage managers. They would need individuals who can design solutions for future data centres and and for that you need people with strong storage skills.