Storage Industry Forging Academic Alliances

The three most common challenges facing the IT Managers and CTOs today are: 1) Ingesting gigabytes of data that are generated globally every second, 2) Managing and accessing data in the most efficient manner 24/7, and 3) Extracting values from all these data. Hence, managing, analyzing and sustaining the astronomical amount of corporate data in the most secure ways via new technologies, such as data center storage and virtualization.

Today, the majority of Computer Science and Information Engineering programs are lacking Storage and Virtualization studies; subsequently, the graduating bodies will miss out on so many job opportunities. Today, many storage companies have to provide extensive training for their new hires on data storage and virtualization, which are the building blocks of rapidly growing Cloud Computing and Services and Big Data technologies.

Today, few companies have successfully forged academic alliances with colleges to fill the gap for much needed data storage and virtualization savvy new-hire engineers and IT staff.

Ramin Elahi, MSEE, is an Adjunct Faculty and Advisory Board Member with the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension. He’s also an Engineering Training Solutions Architect at NetApp Inc., responsible for the on-boarding and training curricula development. Prior to NetApp, he was Training Site Manager for Hitachi Data Systems Academy. He was also the Global Curriculum Manager at Hewlett-Packard. His areas of expertise are data center storage design and architecture, Data ONTAP, cloud storage, and virtualizations. He also held variety of positions at Cisco, Novell and SCO as a consultant and escalation engineer. He implemented the first university-level Data Storage and Virtualization curriculum in Northern California in 2007. He has taught Data Storage, TCP/IP, and Unix System Administration at the UCSC Extension and UC Berkeley Extension since 1996.