What's needed to become a storage engineer?

What education, training, experience, etc. should a storage engineer have? I currently work as a Tier2 Technical Support Engineer for Sun Mircosystems in their storage group and would like to position myself technically for the future in the storage industry.

I don't know what Tier 2 means at Sun but my opinion is that Sun support people have a pretty good grasp on some of the most difficult aspects of storage - volume management. Here are some things that I think storage engineers should know:

• Fibre Channel networking fundamentals. How HBAs, loops and switches communicate - how zoning is applied, how LUN masking is applied.
• Volume management fundamentals, RAID, mirroring
• Backup and recovery fundamentals, media management, automation
• Basic Ethernet/IP networking knowledge
• Basic understanding of file system and database storage functions
• Basic understanding of storage virtualization. (This is almost the same as volume management but with communications differences.)

Regards,
Marc

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