Top 5 Storage Certifications for 2016
Storage certifications continue to be in high demand in today’s workplace, but with over 70 different storage-related credentials available, the choices might be overwhelming. Here are our picks for the best storage certs for 2016.
For the past five or six years, storage-related certifications have loomed large and impressive in a variety of employer and job market surveys. In any case, there’s no doubt that skills and knowledge related to various networked forms of storage — such as storage area networks (SANs), network-attached storage (NAS) and even storage as a service (STaaS) — are in high demand in today’s workplace. Additionally, IT professionals interested in data center or network backbone related positions are likely to need strong storage chops to do their jobs.
In some ways, the state of storage certification perfectly mirrors in a single subject area (or perhaps a closely clustered collection of related subjects) what occurs across the full spectrum of information technology nowadays. That is, there are some vendor-neutral storage certifications available, particularly those from the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and Arcitura, while there are also numerous vendor-specific storage credentials available from vendors that offer storage systems and solutions, including Cisco, Brocade, D-Link, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), HP (H3C), NetApp, Sun/Oracle and Symantec, among others.
As it happens, the vendor-neutral CompTIA/SNIA credential provides an excellent entry point into the world of storage design, implementation and management, while vendor-specific programs tend to match up with what active IT professionals interact with in the workplace for current employers (or what they’d like to interact with for future or prospective employers).
Vendor-neutral credentials recognize broad competency in storage design, implementation and management, while vendor-specific programs tend to match up with technologies active IT professionals interact with in the workplace (or what they’d like to interact with for future or prospective employers).
How is a storage-minded IT professional supposed to pick a winner here? Certain well-known certifications can help, so we provide pointers to our top five in the sections that follow. Note that these five certs are listed in no particular order. Most will be familiar, but you’ll have to let your vendor allegiances and relationships dictate vendor-specific offerings outside this group, too.
Before diving into the details of our five favorites for 2016, take a look at the results of our informal job board survey. The data indicates the number of job posts for a specific location in which our featured certifications were mentioned on a given day. The data should give you an idea of the relative popularity of each certification. Please note that Cisco CCNP swamps the other items because its coverage goes well beyond storage (the CCNP Data Center specialization does involve storage to some degree, but does not focus specifically or only on storage).
