A couple of things happened to me over the last few days that have me thinking about storage + education.

I was reading a post from Brian Henderson, one of my colleagues at EMC. Once I got past the 80s’s hair band reference, the post left me with a lot to think about. He talked about his disaster recovery plan for his digital music, videos and pictures.

That made me think about the first house project I’ll be tackling once I graduate: digitizing my vinyl, home videos, and old pictures. We’ll be purchasing some sort of storage and using Mozy to back it up, just like Brian did.

But this little tidbit from Brian’s post really got me thinking:

Matt, who works at a Boston-based videogame company, isn’t a storage geek.  Which explained the blank stare I had from him after my description.

I’ll just imagine that Matt doesn’t actually do coding, or support of the video games. How can you be an IT professional in this day and age and not know about storage? And do you have to be a storage geek to understand why DR (disaster recovery) is important, or at least how it would work?

When I went to get my eyes examined I started thinking about storage again. I pay $30 extra every year to have some digital scan done. I do this so they don’t have to dilate my eyes, and because I think having a digital record of my retinas may come in handy one day (glaucoma runs in my mom’s side). After the doctor did my eyes this year, he couldn’t find my previous records. I asked why, and he say it was probably on the other machine. I looked down, and this big complex piece of machinery seemed to be attached to a great big Dell PC. I guess my previous exams were on the other hard drive that was attached to the other machine. I immediately wondered, why aren’t these images being preserved on some central storage? And what happens if that Dell box dies? And why isn’t the company selling my eye doctor this system helping him out on storing and preserving his patients’ images?

That whole experience made me think of a post Steve Todd had written about Centera being used for storing digitized medical records. To bring it back to education, Steve quoted a Wall Street Journal article that outlines the five broad categories Obama’s to-do list to get us out of this economic mess. Steve concentrated on the fifth item on the list – digitizing health records. If these records get digitized, they have to be stored someplace. Does that mean more people need to understand how information is stored, managed, secured, etc on a storage array?

Back to storage education specifically. For those of you reading this with a technical academic background, did you actually study about storage in college? Did you understand the difference between SAN and NAS from your studies? Do you think its important that college kids (at least the ones in tech major) have exposure to information storage systems?

My organization has actually developed a generic storage curriculum that is taught in lots of colleges. I wish it had been available to me when I was in school.

I shared a link on Twitter today that I got from the Systers list. The link was to this Dr. Dobbs article, which has since been edited. Basically it’s an article about gnuplot, and there was a link in the first paragraph to a naked lady.

Gah.

I shared the link and pointed out that antics like this are probably one reason there aren’t more women in IT. This led to a flurry of responses from the (male) storage bloggers who follow me:

The guys had the first reaction of whoa, girls can be in IT if they want. Which to me can’t be true or there would be more women.

Next the conversation morphed from the women in IT issue to the issue of what do we actually do? What is our field? If we could define the field, could we attract more people (male and female to the field?)

This is an interesting question. I asked – can you explain to your family what you do for a living? Everyone who answered said no.

I know I can’t explain what I do. I just say I write technical training for the stuff my company sells. You know, computer stuff. If I try to explain what storage is, let alone how important the software I am currently writing training for is to managing network configuration and ensuring compliance to company standards and PCI DSS standards, I get that look. You know the glazed over look of what the heck are you actually saying!! You have always been such a weird girl!

I think this is a valid question. If we can’t explain what we do for a living, can we expect to attract qualified people to the industry? And especially can we expect to attract women and minorities to the field?

One thing my organization has done is developed a generic storage curriculum that is taught for college credit on campuses worldwide. It is a way to put educate undergrads about the storage industry, so it’s a start.

What else can we do to educate people about our craft, thereby encouraging them to join us?

Maybe another time I’ll try to tackle the women in IT issue.