15+ Storage Certifications to Help Advance Your IT Career

Looking to start or advance your career in storage? Here are the 17 most popular credentials ideal for those aspiring to be storage specialists, administrators and engineers

Remember when storage was considered a sufficiently stealthy IT niche that not many people knew much about? We used to refer to storage admins and architects as DC ninjas, because their jobs seemed shrouded in secrecy and they tended to operate only inside the dark confines of the data center.

Today, storage administration is no longer a dark art. It is officially out of the shadows and is now so mission-critical that storage architects and administrators are in extremely high demand. Perhaps you've heard or read about the latest industry buzzword "Big Data." Big Data has to reside somewhere, and that somewhere is usually on a huge honkin' storage array. What better way to capitalize on this job market reality than to pursue a technical certification in the arts and sciences of storage?

Opinions are mixed as to whether or not basic certifications alone assist applicants in finding higher-paying jobs. However, most IT industry analysts agree that advanced technical credentials, the ones that require professional experience and for which you must diligently prepare to pass the cert exam, still command attention (and higher salaries) from employers.

As you review the storage credentials mentioned in this article, note that many of them are vendor- or technology-dependent. In other words, to complete a technical certification on EMC storage hardware and software, you must pursue an EMC-specific storage credential.