It’s that time of year again – time for EMC Education’s annual survey of storage and IT managers and individual contributors. Cutting to the chase – this is the link to the survey.

Every year we reach out to information and storage professionals, excluding any EMC employees, and ask them to give us feedback on the challenges they are seeing in their environments, as well as trends (what technologies is everyone using, what are the new technologies that are actually being adopted, what things do people no longer use).

Each year we publish the results at EMC World. Last year’s survey results can be downloaded here. One place the results were discussed last year was in the Proven Professional Community. Last year’s survey had questions that specifically addressed how the downturn in the economy in 2009 had impacted storage professionals, and those results were pretty telling.

This year, the survey will attempt to measure the impact of virtualization and cloud computing on our industry. Understanding this impact is important from an education perspective – do we have enough skilled workers to meet the demands of virtualization and cloud computing? What skills do they need to know? Is expanding and building on their current set of knowledge skills enough to bridge any gaps identified?

Its also important from a planning perspective. If  I manage a data center, info on emerging trends can help me identify hiring and training needs for the next year.

The survey is not for EMC employees – we are looking for participants who are in the trenches in data centers every day, either building, managing and maintaining these systems, and also the people responsible for managing these sorts of teams. Of course we’ll reach out to the folks who manage EMC storage, but the intent is to create a comprehensive industry survey. So please consider participating even if you don’t have any EMC arrays in your shop.

Once again here’s the link to the survey. We have a discussion started in the Proven Professional Community – if you have any questions about the survey logistics please let us know! We’ll also be previewing some of the findings in the community, so keep an eye out for that!

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