Flash storage and big data analytics are currently two of the biggest buzzwords in the tech industry, and for a good reason: pundits agree that these two trends are playing a big role in the transformation of IT as a whole, from the technology itself to the people managing it within the enterprise. Our founding editor John Furrier has been covering this topic extensively throughout many Cube interviews, including the latest here.

In his freshest post on the Wikibon blog, Dave Vellante decided to tackle this topic from the human resources angle. He discusses how the storage admin fits in it all, and the need to adapt appropriately in order to stay on the job. Storage is moving back to the server.

“As signaled by announcements such as EMC’s VFCache, the storage hierarchy is evolving. This is both an opportunity and a threat to storage administrators. On the one hand, as storage management function moves up the stack and closer to the processor, it is an opportunity for storage professionals to expand their knowledge and their sphere of influence.”

Vellante pointed at several key areas of interest for professionals at this particular line of work; specifically virtualization. Storage admins should expand their skillset not only in the direction of servers but also more specific skills that correspond with the growing amount of data-driven workloads enterprise IT is handling today. The idea is that as their responsibilities shift long term, they can move their focus to areas that would fit well with their updated job description.

Vellante summarized by noting that storage is not out of style just yet, but there is nevertheless a strong need to adapt – both for enterprises as a whole that want to be able to keep up, and the individuals within that are driving these new trends.