Wanted: 1 million storage staff

MEGA, GIGA TERA, peta and exabyte numbers getting bigger we know about but now the world will need one million workers just to handle all that data.

A study (The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010), projects a six-fold annual information growth from 2006 to 2010, from 161 exabytes in 2006 to more than 988 exabytes in 2010.

EMC said its own internal research (is this navel gazing or worse?) has shown that 1 million storage professionals will be needed by 2012. The firm then makes a rather tenuous link by saying that that research outfit Forrester said 76 million baby boomers will leave the US workforce by 2017, with only 46 million people replace them.

This apparently will lead to, “a shortage of employees with the right background and training to help businesses handle the information deluge and the storage problem it creates.”

But don’t rush screaming into the streets quite yet. To solve the problem the answer is to sign up to the EMC’s Academic Alliance in one of 170 universities and colleges across in Brazil, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Mexico, Russia, Scotland and the United States. It's a course in storage. Crisis averted. µ