Top 12 Storage Architect Skills to Put on Your Resume

In a world where data sprawls and expectations pile up, a storage architect’s resume wins when it blends pragmatic depth with range. Hard technical chops. Sensible design judgment. Operational calm. Show breadth across platforms, demonstrate fluency with the right acronyms, and highlight how you made systems faster, safer, leaner.

Storage Architect Skills

1. SAN/NAS
2. VMware vSphere
3. AWS S3
4. Azure Blob
5. OpenStack Swift
6. Hadoop HDFS
7. Fibre Channel
8. iSCSI
9. ZFS
10. Ceph
11. NetApp Data ONTAP
12. Dell PowerMax (formerly EMC VMAX)

1. SAN/NAS

SAN (Storage Area Network) delivers high-speed, block-level storage over a dedicated fabric. NAS (Network Attached Storage) exposes file services over standard networks. Architects juggle both: SAN to satisfy latency-sensitive, transactional workloads; NAS to streamline shared file services at scale using SMB and NFS.

Why It's Important

SAN/NAS underpins centralized, resilient, and scalable storage. It’s the backbone for performance, availability, and sane operations across critical enterprise apps.

How to Improve SAN/NAS Skills

1. Upgrade Hardware

• Capacity and speed: Expand capacity judiciously. Favor SSD and NVMe for hot data, especially metadata and logs.
• Faster fabrics: For SAN, consider NVMe/FC or NVMe/TCP where feasible. For NAS, move to 25/40/100GbE to crush bottlenecks.

2. Optimize Configuration

• RAID trade-offs: RAID 10 for write-heavy speed, RAID 6 for balanced efficiency and protection. Validate rebuild windows and blast radius.
• Block and file tuning: Align block sizes and file system parameters to workload patterns. Trim/UNMAP, queue depths, and multipathing matter.

3. Deduplication and Compression

• Space savings without drama: Turn on inline dedupe/compression where supported. Monitor CPU impact and data temperature.

4. Caching and Tiering

• Read/write caches: SSD caches slash latency for hot reads; write-back caches accelerate sync writes when safely protected.
• Automated tiering: Shift data across SSD/HDD tiers by access patterns. Keep policies simple, verify movement schedules.

5. Software and Protocol Enhancements

• Stay current: Firmware, drivers, and array OS updates often deliver tangible gains and fixes.
• Protocol tuning: For NAS, tune SMB multichannel/signing and NFS version/number of threads. For SAN, right-size HBA queue depths and timeouts.

6. Monitor and Analyze

• Full-stack visibility: Track latency (read/write), IOPS, throughput, cache hit ratios, and fabric health. Alert on early warning signs.
• Capacity forecasting: Growth curves and churn rates avert ugly surprises.

7. Network Hygiene

• Clean paths: Redundant links, deterministic routing, and QoS for storage traffic.
• Jumbo frames (where consistent): Only if end to end. Mismatch causes pain.

How to Display SAN/NAS Skills on Your Resume

2. VMware vSphere

vSphere virtualizes compute and intersects deeply with storage: VMFS, NFS, vVols, and vSAN. It’s a control plane for performance policies, availability, and automation at datacenter scale.

Why It's Important

It centralizes storage policy, scales cleanly, and bakes in HA/DRS/FT. With vVols and vSAN, storage behavior becomes per-VM and intent-driven.

How to Improve VMware vSphere Skills

1. Storage design: Match datastore type to workload. VMFS for broad compatibility, NFS for simplicity, vVols for per-VM granularity, vSAN for HCI agility.
2. Prioritize I/O: Use Storage I/O Control and per-VM policies to protect critical apps during contention.
3. vSAN tuning: Choose ESA/OSA appropriately, size cache for writes, validate fault domains, and confirm resync windows don’t collide with business peaks.
4. Alignment and sizing: Right-size VMDKs, queues, and PVSCSI adapters. Avoid noisy-neighbor patterns by thoughtful placement.
5. Observability: Track end-to-end latency in vCenter and ops tooling. Baselines beat hunches—compare before/after changes.
6. Know the limits: Keep an eye on config maximums and hardware compatibility. Respect them; they’re there for a reason.
7. Stay current: Newer vSphere releases bring storage pathing, NVMe, and policy improvements worth the upgrade.

How to Display VMware vSphere Skills on Your Resume

3. AWS S3

AWS S3 is elastic object storage for backups, analytics, media, and application data. Durable, global, and pay-as-you-go. Encryption by default, and deep lifecycle tooling for cost control.

Why It's Important

Architects lean on S3 for infinite-feeling scale, airtight durability, and straightforward integration with the rest of the cloud stack.

How to Improve AWS S3 Skills

1. Performance: Use multi-part and parallel uploads. Exploit byte-range fetches. For latency-sensitive workloads, consider S3 Express One Zone where appropriate.
2. Security: Enforce Block Public Access and Object Ownership (ACLs disabled). Default encryption is on—pair it with tight IAM policies and bucket policies.
3. Cost control: Lifecycle policies send data to Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier Instant/Flexible/Deep, or expire it entirely. Watch per-request costs, not just GB-month.
4. Governance: Versioning, object lock (WORM), replication (same or cross-region), and strong tagging keep sprawling buckets sane.
5. Observability: Storage metrics and inventory reports surface drift and hotspots. Monitor 4xx/5xx rates and retry patterns.

How to Display AWS S3 Skills on Your Resume

4. Azure Blob

Azure Blob Storage houses unstructured data at planetary scale. Hot, Cool, Archive tiers; object replication; ADLS Gen2 for analytics; and tight identity integration.

Why It's Important

It’s the anchor for backups, streams, analytics, and distribution in Azure-heavy shops. Durable, flexible, and policy-friendly.

How to Improve Azure Blob Skills

1. Throughput and latency: Choose Premium for low-latency needs. Enable Blob Index for fast filtering. For analytics, stick with ADLS Gen2 semantics.
2. Spend wisely: Lifecycle rules to tier or delete cold data. Reserved capacity can trim predictable costs. Measure egress and transactions, not just storage.
3. Security posture: RBAC with least privilege, Private Endpoints, customer-managed keys, and Defender for Storage for threat signals. SAS only when needed, scoped and short-lived.
4. Data mobility: Object replication across regions for DR and locality. For massive ingests, Data Box or bulk copy tooling gets you over the hump.
5. Operations: Monitor metrics and logs, enable versioning and soft delete, and consider immutable storage for compliance scenarios.

How to Display Azure Blob Skills on Your Resume

5. OpenStack Swift

Swift is distributed object storage with replication or erasure coding, designed to scale out horizontally and keep serving even during failures.

Why It's Important

When you need on-prem object storage with open-source flexibility and serious durability, Swift delivers.

How to Improve OpenStack Swift Skills

1. Performance levers: Right-size proxy workers, tune concurrency, and park account/container DBs on SSD. Network pathways must be clear and redundant.
2. Multi-region: Stretch across regions for availability and locality, with storage policies to orchestrate placement.
3. Security: TLS everywhere, at-rest encryption enabled, and tight auth integration. Don’t forget to rotate credentials and certificates.
4. Monitoring and repair: Track ring balance, rebalance carefully, and keep an eye on replication health. Centralize logs and export metrics to your observability stack.
5. Capacity and lifecycle: Forecast growth. Use object versioning and lifecycle cleanup to avoid unbounded sprawl.

How to Display OpenStack Swift Skills on Your Resume

6. Hadoop HDFS

HDFS spreads big data across commodity nodes with fault tolerance and high throughput. The foundation for many batch and streaming analytics stacks.

Why It's Important

Cost-effective scale-out storage for large datasets, with the locality and bandwidth needed for heavy processing.

How to Improve Hadoop HDFS Skills

1. Namespace scale: Use HDFS Federation to expand beyond a single NameNode namespace.
2. High availability: Active/standby NameNodes with automatic failover minimize downtime. Test failover paths, don’t just configure them.
3. Space efficiency: Erasure Coding trims overhead versus triple replication, best for colder or large sequential data.
4. Tiering: Mix SSD and HDD tiers and steer hot data appropriately. Archive older data to colder media.
5. Security: Kerberos for auth, wire encryption, at-rest encryption, and ACLs for finer access control.
6. Tuning: Choose block size and replication factors by workload profile. Balance cluster periodically; keep JVM and OS tuned for I/O.
7. Operations: Use FSCK, balancer, and health dashboards to catch skew, corruption, and saturation before users do.

How to Display Hadoop HDFS Skills on Your Resume

7. Fibre Channel

Fibre Channel is purpose-built storage networking with predictable latency and strong isolation. FC fabrics power many enterprise SANs.

Why It's Important

It’s fast, reliable, and mature. With NVMe/FC support, FC remains a top choice for latency-sensitive block workloads.

How to Improve Fibre Channel Skills

1. Modernize speeds: Move to 32G/64G where appropriate. Validate optics, cables, and end-to-end compatibility.
2. Fabric design: Core-edge topologies, deterministic paths, and consistent port speeds reduce congestion and surprise.
3. Zoning discipline: Single-initiator zoning, clean aliases, and strict change control keep blasts contained.
4. Congestion management: Monitor credit starvation, CRC errors, and link resets. Remediate physical faults quickly.
5. Firmware hygiene: Keep HBAs, switches, and arrays current and aligned on supported code trains.
6. Plan for NVMe: Introduce NVMe/FC where it’s a fit—measure real latency and CPU savings, not just brochure numbers.

How to Display Fibre Channel Skills on Your Resume

8. iSCSI

iSCSI carries SCSI over IP, making block storage accessible on standard Ethernet networks. Scales from lab to production with careful design.

Why It's Important

It enables cost-effective SAN-like capabilities without a dedicated FC fabric. Flexible, familiar, and widely supported.

How to Improve iSCSI Skills

1. Dedicated lanes: Give iSCSI its own VLANs and NICs. 10/25/40GbE with consistent MTU. QoS where needed.
2. Jumbo frames (cautiously): Use only with end-to-end consistency and validation. Otherwise, skip them.
3. Pathing and resilience: MPIO or multiple sessions per target for throughput and failover. Test fail paths regularly.
4. NIC offloads: TOE/RSS, CPU pinning, and interrupt moderation reduce jitter. Hardware initiators where supported can help.
5. Security: CHAP (prefer mutual). Consider IPsec on untrusted networks. Segmentation is your friend.
6. Alternatives: For next-gen performance, evaluate NVMe/TCP. Same Ethernet, lower latency, new tuning playbook.
7. Observe and tune: Watch retransmits, drops, latency spikes. Right-size queues and window sizes to workload behavior.

How to Display ISCSI Skills on Your Resume

9. ZFS

ZFS (OpenZFS) fuses a copy-on-write file system with a volume manager. End-to-end checksums, scrubs, snapshots, clones, and smart RAID—an integrity-first design.

Why It's Important

Data correctness matters. ZFS catches and fixes silent corruption while delivering flexible pooling and powerful data services.

How to Improve ZFS Skills

1. Recordsize fit: Match recordsize to the workload (databases smaller, streaming larger). Avoid blanket defaults.
2. ARC/L2ARC: Size ARC to available RAM. Add persistent L2ARC SSDs for read-heavy profiles that miss in ARC.
3. SLOG for sync writes: A fast, power-safe SSD as SLOG can transform latency for sync-heavy workloads.
4. Topology matters: Choose RAIDZ levels to balance performance and protection. Mirror vdevs shine for IOPS; RAIDZ for capacity efficiency.
5. Compression on: LZ4 is a strong default—often faster overall due to less I/O. Dedup only when it clearly pays.
6. Fragmentation and scrubs: Monitor fragmentation. Add vdevs rather than overfilling. Run scrubs on a regular cadence.
7. Modern features: Consider special vdevs for metadata/small blocks and dRAID in newer OpenZFS releases for faster resilvering.

How to Display ZFS Skills on Your Resume

10. Ceph

Ceph is distributed storage for objects, blocks, and files in one fault-tolerant, self-healing system. No single point of failure. Scale by adding nodes.

Why It's Important

One platform to rule many storage needs—RBD for block, RGW for object, CephFS for files. Flexible placement and strong durability.

How to Improve Ceph Skills

1. Hardware fit: SSDs for BlueStore DB/WAL, balanced CPU and RAM, and non-blocking networks. Don’t starve the back end.
2. Placement and pools: Tune PG counts and CRUSH rules so data lands where it should. Align failure domains with reality.
3. Replication vs EC: Replication for hot and small I/O, erasure coding for colder or large objects. Measure, don’t guess.
4. CephFS at scale: Multiple MDS daemons for active/standby or active/active. Separate pools for metadata and data.
5. Observability: Use the dashboard and metrics to watch recovery, backfill, scrub rates, and client latencies. Keep OSDs healthy and evenly utilized.
6. Upgrades and tuning: Track stable releases (e.g., Quincy/Reef/Squid) and apply targeted tunables rather than blanket tweaks.
7. RGW smarts: For object use, enable multisite where needed, tune threading, and validate S3/Swift compatibility with apps.

How to Display Ceph Skills on Your Resume

11. NetApp Data ONTAP

ONTAP powers NetApp systems with unified block and file storage, tight data protection, and smooth cloud extension. Policy-driven, efficient, and proven.

Why It's Important

It simplifies mixed SAN/NAS estates, adds first-class data services, and bridges on-prem with public cloud elegantly.

How to Improve NetApp Data ONTAP Skills

1. Performance policies: Adaptive QoS keeps workloads in their lanes. Use per-volume or per-VM granularity to curb noisy neighbors.
2. HA and resilience: Exploit HA pairs and MetroCluster where business dictates continuous service. Validate failover timing.
3. Efficiency stack: Inline dedupe, compression, and compaction—great defaults. Thin provisioning with guardrails.
4. Snapshots and replication: Snapshot schedules for quick restores; SnapMirror (including synchronous where needed) for DR.
5. FabricPool: Tier cold blocks to object storage without rewriting apps. Save space on-prem, keep data accessible.
6. Monitoring: Use Active IQ insights to predict capacity/performance issues and plan upgrades before the crunch.
7. Security and ransomware: Immutable snapshots, MFA, FPolicy, and anomaly detection reduce risk and blast radius.
8. Cloud alignment: Cloud Volumes ONTAP extends familiar controls into AWS/Azure/GCP. Validate performance profiles per cloud.

How to Display NetApp Data ONTAP Skills on Your Resume

12. Dell PowerMax (formerly EMC VMAX)

PowerMax is Dell’s flagship enterprise block storage line, the successor to EMC VMAX. Massive performance, sky-high availability, rich replication, and automated tiering.

Why It's Important

For mission-critical apps that refuse to blink—databases, core transaction systems—PowerMax delivers predictable latency and deep data services.

How to Improve Dell PowerMax/VMAX Skills

1. Right-size tiers: Use automated tiering to keep hot data on the fastest media. Review placement and movement windows regularly.
2. Cache and front-end: Allocate cache thoughtfully to priority workloads. Balance front-end ports, avoid oversubscription, and spread initiators.
3. Replication strategy: SRDF for remote replication (sync or async) with tested runbooks. Align RPO/RTO to application reality.
4. Performance telemetry: Monitor latency, queue depths, and skew across storage groups. Hunt contention, then fix—not the other way around.
5. Code currency: Keep microcode and management tooling on supported, stable releases. Newer trains bring meaningful performance and resiliency gains.
6. Fabric hygiene: Clean FC zoning, consistent speeds, and vigilant error remediation. Test failover paths twice.
7. Capacity modeling: Model growth and rebuild impact. Plan headroom above normal peaks to absorb failures without a cliff.

How to Display Dell PowerMax (EMC VMAX) Skills on Your Resume