By Rich Castagna, Editor-in-Chief,
Storage magazine
If your paycheck seems a little heftier this year, you're not
alone among other storage professionals. IT staff members who spend
at least a portion of their time working with storage reported an
average salary of $80,892 for 2006 -- about 4.3% more than last
year -- according to Storage magazine's annual Storage
Salary Survey (see
"About the survey" and "Average salary over the past four
years, on this page").
That raise is right in line with national IT-wide statistics,
and represents a modest jump in the mostly flat salaries over the
past three years. "The mean national salary for storage
administrators with a SAN specialty was $80,500," says David Foote,
CEO of Foote Partners LLC, a New Canaan, Conn.-based research firm
that focuses on IT skills and compensation. "SAN people are on our
hot list right now," he adds.
Whether the slight spike represents the beginning of an upward
trend in storage salaries remains to be seen, but industry experts
see storage as one of the most in-demand IT sectors.
As we've seen in previous surveys, salaries vary depending on
industry, location, company size, storage capacity managed and
management responsibilities. The range of salaries reported
underscores those variations, with a low annual compensation of
$27,480 and a top end of $207,000. But overall, the news is good
across the board. Storage employment and compensation may not be so
bound to economic factors as they are to the tremendous storage
growth most companies are experiencing and the attendant efforts to
apply new technologies to rein in that growth. So whether the
economy blows hot or cold, it looks like storage expertise will be
needed.
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