Is storage certification worth it?

Job experience is king
In today's workplace, when it comes to finding the right candidate for a job, it's real experience--not certifications--that counts, says veteran CIO/CTO Norbert J. Kubilus. He's a partner with Tatum CIO Partners in San Diego. Over the years, he's hired scores of people in storage-related positions at all types and sizes of companies. "In general, I support certification, but certification that's coupled with real experience," he says.

Many people today earn lots of certifications in response to the marketing message that it takes a certification to get a job, says Kubilus. The push for certifications comes not only from the vendors themselves, but from the whole cottage industry of people that train others to take the tests.

"If I had two candidates for a job and they were going to manage my storage across the enterprise," Kubilus says, "and I had somebody who had two or three years of storage management experience and a certification, and I had another person who had five or 10 years of experience, and no certification, but could demonstrate success at managing division or enterprise-wide storage, I would probably go with the person with the experience without the certification."

Employers today look for employees with a set of credentials that includes both experience and certifications, says Anderson. Ideally, people should pursue certifications that will enhance their careers. "In reality, however, there is a small segment of the IT population that figures the more certifications, the more valuable they are," Anderson says. "But it's not the letters that matter; it's what the letters represent. They are supposed to represent the knowledge; they are supposed to represent your skills and they are supposed to be a way for an employer to recognize your capability."

Certifications a good personal test
Ray Dickensheets agrees that there's a need for more expertise among storage professionals in general. He's a senior-level technology and research and development staff member at Sprint in Overland Park, KS, and a self-taught SAN expert. He also has earned all three SNIA certifications and is the owner of the first SNIA Level 2 "practitioner" certificate. He also holds a much older and more generalized "Certificate in Data Processing" and is presently working on a Cisco networking certification.

Despite his experience, Dickensheets says he opted to pursue the SNIA certifications as a personal test, to find out whether he really knew the information, and to help sort through all the conflicting information in his field. "The certification maybe gave a little more weight, a little more credence to statements or recommendations that I might make relative to some of our products," he says. "It also clarified some thinking, perhaps in terms of approaches, and made me go back, reevaluate things that I had learned and the things I had done before."

Dickensheets urges others, whether they are in his field or aspiring to get into the field, to seek out instructor-led training. This advice is especially relevant for someone who has limited field experience. Although Dickensheets says he sees value in both types of certification, he prefers the vendor-neutral SNIA certifications. That's because of the open environment in which many organizations such as Sprint operate.

For example, Dickensheets says, he works in a Sprint lab with four or five switch types, which are different sizes and come from different manufacturers. "In my own particular situation, knowing Vendor A's switch backward and forward doesn't do me an awful lot of good," he says. "It's nice to know it, but what I need to know is storage area networking fundamentals, standards and how things are supposed to operate together."

Should certifications be a prerequisite to a job? It's a chicken-and-egg kind of argument, says Dickensheets. "It could be difficult to get certification until you get a little bit of experience, and it could be difficult to get the job experience until you get certification," he says. "So I don't think it should be a prerequisite, but I think perhaps it should be expected of anyone who is going to stay in that field for any period of time."

It's tough to single out the most popular storage-related certification, says Infinity I/O's Johnson, because most are product-focused. In switches, for example, Brocade and McData may have the most popular offerings, while in the field of storage arrays, it's EMC and Hitachi. "I would guess that Brocade may have one of the highest numbers of certifications because their program has been out the longest," she says.

Keep in mind, too, that vendor-specific certifications are becoming less important as vendors share APIs and system interoperability increases, says Doug Chandler, IDC program director for storage and data management services. Two years ago, just about every storage company had a somewhat proprietary way of doing things. "If you had EMC equipment, for example, in your shop, you needed people who knew EMC very well," says Chandler. "Today, that's not necessarily the case. We are moving more toward a fairly standardized way of doing things."

Gartner Inc. analyst Ray Paquet also isn't a big believer in certifications. Having good communications skills, good troubleshooting skills and a technical background is more important than a certification, Paquet says. A technical background shows the ability to learn a technology. Good troubleshooting skills are important because storage professionals need to find and fix problems. And communications skills are essential because IT organizations are in the services industry, and part of services is being a people person.

"Give me those three skills, and I don't care about anything else," says Paquet. "If you need to learn about EMC gears, I can teach you that. If you need to learn about Veritas backup, I can teach you that. Things are going to change. What you learn today may not be needed tomorrow. Having a solid technical background and showing the ability to learn is far more important than any specific skill. Hanging your hat on any one thing in a world that continues to evolve at the rate of [storage] technology is very dangerous."