Top 12 Storage Engineer Skills to Put on Your Resume
In the rapidly evolving field of data storage and management, having a standout resume is crucial for storage engineers seeking to advance their careers. Highlighting a robust set of skills on your resume not only showcases your expertise but also positions you as a highly competitive candidate in this specialized domain.
Storage Engineer Skills
- SAN (Storage Area Network)
- NAS (Network Attached Storage)
- RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)
- iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface)
- Fibre Channel
- VMware ESXi
- Hyper-V
- AWS S3 (Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service)
- Azure Blob Storage
- Hadoop HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System)
- ZFS (Zettabyte File System)
- OpenStack Swift
1. SAN (Storage Area Network)
A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a dedicated, high-speed network that provides block-level storage access to multiple servers, enabling centralized storage management and scalability for applications and databases.
Why It's Important
SAN is critical for Storage Engineers because it delivers high-speed, dedicated network access to consolidated, block-level storage, enabling efficient data management, scalability, and strong performance for enterprise applications.
How to Improve SAN (Storage Area Network) Skills
Improving a SAN involves tuning performance, hardening security, and designing for uptime.
Performance tuning: Monitor IOPS, latency, queue depths, and port utilization. Adjust zoning, LUN sizes, queue depths, and enable load balancing across front-end ports.
Plan for growth: Use scalable fabric designs and modular arrays. Keep headroom in ports, cache, and drive bays to avoid painful forklifts later.
Security: Enforce single-initiator zoning, LUN masking, role-based access, and encryption at rest and in flight. Keep firmware current.
High availability: Multipathing everywhere, dual fabrics, redundant controllers, and tested failover. Document the paths; test them under load.
Data protection: Snapshots, clones, and asynchronous/synchronous replication. Verify RPO/RTO with regular recovery drills.
Disaster recovery: Cross-site replication, runbooks, and automated failover where possible. Don’t skip failback testing.
Audits and lifecycle: Periodic health checks, firmware baselines, and hardware refresh planning before support sunsets.
Keep learning: Vendor certifications and hands-on labs sharpen troubleshooting instincts and keep you current.
Focus on these areas and SANs behave predictably, fast, and safe.
How to Display SAN (Storage Area Network) Skills on Your Resume
2. NAS (Network Attached Storage)
NAS is a dedicated file storage device on a network, allowing many users and client systems to store and retrieve data from a centralized pool. It serves files over protocols like SMB and NFS and is built for easy access, data sharing, and straightforward scaling.
Why It's Important
NAS centralizes file data, streamlines permissions and sharing, and supports backups and snapshots, making daily collaboration and protection simpler.
How to Improve NAS (Network Attached Storage) Skills
Turn a decent NAS into a dependable workhorse with a few focused moves.
Stay current: Keep NAS firmware and packages updated for stability and security.
Right-size capacity: Add drives or shelves as growth demands. Validate RAID rebuild windows and spare strategies.
Faster networking: Step up to 2.5/5/10/25 GbE where needed. Ensure switches, cables, and NICs are end-to-end consistent.
Smart RAID: Use RAID levels that fit the risk and workload (e.g., RAID 6 or RAIDZ2 for large drives). Don’t mix SMR with CMR when reliability matters.
Accelerate I/O: SSDs as cache or all-flash pools for hot data. Separate metadata when supported.
Link aggregation: LACP for bandwidth and failover, but validate hashing policies match your traffic patterns.
Lock it down: Strong auth, least-privilege shares, SMB signing, NFSv4 with Kerberos, encryption at rest, and snapshots with immutability where available.
Pick the right filesystem: Btrfs or ZFS for snapshots, checksums, and scrubs. Schedule scrubs; watch SMART.
Backups: 3-2-1 rule, with at least one offsite or immutable copy. Test restores, not just backups.
Watch health: Temperatures, fan speeds, disk errors, latency. Alerting beats surprises.
How to Display NAS (Network Attached Storage) Skills on Your Resume
3. RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)
RAID combines multiple disks into a logical set to improve performance, resilience, or both.
Why It's Important
RAID boosts uptime and throughput, shielding data from single-disk failures and smoothing I/O bursts that would cripple a lone drive.
How to Improve RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) Skills
Pick the right level: Match RAID 1/10 for low latency and quick rebuilds; RAID 5/6 for capacity and resilience; mirrors or RAIDZ2 for large drives.
Use enterprise drives: NAS/enterprise models with TLER/ERC. Avoid SMR in arrays that need fast rebuilds.
Hot spares and fast rebuilds: Keep hot spares ready. Prefer shorter rebuild domains (more, smaller vdevs or mirrors) to reduce risk windows.
Tune stripe and cache: Align stripe sizes with workload. Enable controller cache with battery/flash-backed protection.
Keep firmware fresh: Controller and drive firmware updates fix bugs and improve stability.
Thermals and power: Cool airflow and stable power rails extend drive life. Monitor vibration in dense chassis.
Scrub and monitor: Regular consistency checks, SMART polling, and alerts. Replace suspect drives before they fail loudly.
Right tool for the job: Weigh software RAID versus hardware RAID for your OS, support model, and observability needs.
How to Display RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) Skills on Your Resume
4. iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface)
iSCSI carries SCSI commands across IP networks, letting servers talk to remote block storage as if it were local. Familiar networking, block-level semantics.
Why It's Important
iSCSI builds SAN-like capability on Ethernet, often at lower cost and with simpler gear. Flexible. Scalable. Familiar to network teams.
How to Improve iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface) Skills
Isolation: Dedicated VLANs or physical networks for iSCSI. No mixing with chatty user traffic.
Jumbo frames: End-to-end 9000 MTU where supported and consistent. Verify on NICs, switches, targets, initiators.
Multipathing: Enable MPIO for redundancy and load balancing. Consider Multiple Connections per Session (MCS) when appropriate.
Tune TCP/IP: Window scaling, buffer sizes, and interrupt moderation tailored to your NICs and workload. Disable offloads that hurt latency if needed.
QoS and flow: Prioritize storage traffic and ensure pause/flow control settings are consistent across the path.
Security: CHAP for auth, per-initiator ACLs, and IPsec or MACsec where encryption in transit is required.
How to Display iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface) Skills on Your Resume
5. Fibre Channel
Fibre Channel is a high-speed transport for storage networking, engineered for predictable latency and reliability. It links servers and storage over purpose-built fabrics.
Why It's Important
It delivers low-latency, lossless transport with mature zoning and management, ideal for large transactional workloads and mission-critical databases.
How to Improve Fibre Channel Skills
Clean topology: Core-edge designs, balanced ISLs, minimal hops. Keep things symmetric.
Zoning discipline: Single-initiator zoning and tight LUN masking. Reduce blast radius.
Speed and optics: Upgrade to 32G/64G where needed. Use qualified optics and short, known-good cables.
Credit health: Monitor buffer-to-buffer credits and latency. Tune fill words and credit recovery as advised by your switch vendor.
Aggregation: Trunk ISLs and use port channeling to boost bandwidth and resilience.
Firmware hygiene: Keep HBAs, switches, and array firmware in compatible, up-to-date bundles.
Watch the fabric: Continuous monitoring for CRCs, link flaps, and congested ports. Quarantine bad actors quickly.
How to Display Fibre Channel Skills on Your Resume
6. VMware ESXi
VMware ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor that virtualizes compute, storage, and networking so many VMs can run on one physical host.
Why It's Important
For storage engineers, ESXi unlocks advanced storage features, flexible provisioning, and policy-driven control across clusters, squeezing more value from shared arrays and local disks.
How to Improve VMware ESXi Skills
Stay on supported releases: Newer ESXi brings fixes and storage optimizations. Keep vCenter aligned.
Use VMFS6 or vSAN: Automatic space reclamation, modern locking, and better scale. Enable UNMAP/ATS and trim where applicable.
SIOC and reservations: Storage I/O Control and Storage Policies prevent noisy neighbors and enforce intent.
Multipathing: Match path selection to your array (Round Robin, MRU, fixed). Tune IOPS per path for active-active arrays.
Fast storage: NVMe and 10/25/40/100 Gb storage networks reduce latency. Keep NIC and HBA drivers in sync with firmware.
vVols and SPBM: Offload array features per-VM with Storage Policy Based Management for cleaner operations.
Monitor deeply: ESXTOP, vCenter performance charts, and alerts for latency (AQLEN, DAVG/KAVG/GAVG). Catch contention early.
Caching: Host cache or array-side caching to accelerate hot data.
How to Display VMware ESXi Skills on Your Resume
7. Hyper-V
Hyper-V is Microsoft’s virtualization platform for running and managing virtual machines on Windows servers, with tight integration to Windows storage features.
Why It's Important
It enables dynamic storage allocation, resilient snapshots and replication, and smooth management of virtual disks and fabrics in Windows-centric environments.
How to Improve Hyper-V Skills
Disk choices: Prefer VHDX. Use fixed for steady performance, dynamic for space efficiency when workloads allow.
Storage fabrics: For iSCSI/FC, configure MPIO. For SMB shares, use SMB Direct (RDMA) with properly tuned NICs.
S2D and clustering: Storage Spaces Direct for scale-out, plus Cluster Shared Volumes for mobility and resilience.
Offloads and trim: Ensure ODX and UNMAP/trim are enabled end-to-end to keep storage lean.
Networking: Team NICs for throughput and redundancy. QoS to protect storage traffic.
Observe and adjust: PerfMon counters for latency, queue length, and throughput guide right-sized changes.
How to Display Hyper-V Skills on Your Resume
8. AWS S3 (Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service)
AWS S3 is a scalable, durable object storage service for backups, archives, logs, analytics datasets, and application content, accessible from anywhere.
Why It's Important
It offers massive scale, strong durability, fine-grained access control, and a range of storage classes that help control cost without giving up reliability.
How to Improve AWS S3 (Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service) Skills
Performance: Use Transfer Acceleration when global edges help. Parallelize uploads/downloads and use byte-range requests for big objects.
Security: Block public access by default. Enforce least-privilege IAM, bucket policies, and default server-side encryption. Enable Object Ownership where needed.
Cost: Lifecycle policies to transition or expire data. Intelligent-Tiering for changing access patterns. Choose the right class (Standard, IA, Glacier, Deep Archive).
Resilience and access: Versioning, Object Lock for immutability, and cross-region or same-region replication. Consider Multi-Region Access Points for global reads.
Data efficiency: S3 Select to pull only needed data from objects. Compress and partition wisely.
How to Display AWS S3 (Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service) Skills on Your Resume
9. Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft’s cloud object store for unstructured data, serving files to browsers, powering analytics, and backing up and archiving content at global scale.
Why It's Important
It provides elastic capacity, geographic redundancy options, enterprise security, and tight integration with Azure analytics and networking.
How to Improve Azure Blob Storage Skills
Right-size tiers: Hot, Cool, Archive—match access patterns to cost. Turn on lifecycle rules to automate transitions and deletions.
Durability: Choose LRS/ZRS/GRS/RA-GRS based on compliance and recovery goals.
Security: Use Azure AD with RBAC, default encryption, Private Endpoints, and SAS tokens with short lifetimes. Enable soft delete and versioning.
Big data: Enable Data Lake Storage Gen2 (hierarchical namespace) for analytics workloads.
Indexing and access: Blob index tags for quick filtering, CDN for global acceleration where latency stings.
Observability: Azure Monitor metrics and logs for capacity, latency, and throttling. Alert early, scale before pain hits.
Network paths: Optimize with ExpressRoute or well-architected egress patterns to steady throughput.
How to Display Azure Blob Storage Skills on Your Resume
10. Hadoop HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System)
HDFS is a distributed, fault-tolerant filesystem for storing huge datasets across commodity servers, built for high-throughput access and resilience.
Why It's Important
It enables reliable storage and processing of massive data volumes, spreading risk across nodes and racks while keeping throughput high.
How to Improve Hadoop HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) Skills
Configuration: Tune block size, replication factor, and JVM memory to match file sizes and workload patterns. Larger blocks favor streaming reads.
Federation and HA: Use HDFS Federation for namespace scale and NameNode High Availability with quorum-based journaling to avoid single points of failure.
Erasure coding: For colder data, reduce storage overhead versus replication while maintaining durability.
Caching: Pin hot datasets in memory to cut read latency where it counts.
Placement: Rack awareness for locality and survivability. Balance data regularly to prevent hotspots.
Upgrades and monitoring: Keep to supported releases. Monitor FSCK results, NameNode metrics, and DataNode health. Act on small warnings before they snowball.
Tame small files: Combine small files or rethink ingestion to avoid NameNode pressure.
How to Display Hadoop HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) Skills on Your Resume
11. ZFS (Zettabyte File System)
ZFS is a combined filesystem and volume manager with end-to-end checksums, snapshots, clones, and self-healing to guard against silent corruption at scale.
Why It's Important
It delivers robust data integrity, easy snapshots and replication, and serious scalability, making large storage sets manageable and safer.
How to Improve ZFS (Zettabyte File System) Skills
Tune for workload: Set recordsize to match data (e.g., 128K for large sequential files, smaller for DBs). Consider atime=off where appropriate.
Compression first: Enable LZ4 by default. It’s fast and usually “free” performance.
Hardware layout: Use mirrors or RAIDZ2 for big disks. Align ashift for 4Kn drives. Keep vdevs consistent.
Acceleration: SLOG (fast, power-protected SSD) for synchronous writes; L2ARC for read-heavy datasets. Consider special vdevs for metadata and small files.
Health and scrubs: Monthly scrubs, SMART checks, and proactive replacements. Watch for checksum errors and slow I/O outliers.
Dedup with care: Only when memory-heavy systems and data patterns justify it. Otherwise, skip it.
Lifecycle: Regular snapshots, replication to a second system, and offsite copies. Test restores.
How to Display ZFS (Zettabyte File System) Skills on Your Resume
12. OpenStack Swift
OpenStack Swift is an open-source, distributed object storage system that spreads data across servers and drives for durability, scale, and availability.
Why It's Important
It manages oceans of unstructured data with replication or erasure coding, supports multi-region designs, and keeps storage simple for cloud platforms.
How to Improve OpenStack Swift Skills
Performance: Tune proxy workers and server concurrency. Use SSDs for account/container DBs. Add memcached to cut metadata lookups.
Security: Encrypt at rest, enforce TLS for clients, rotate credentials, and keep nodes patched. Least privilege for service accounts.
Resilience and scale: Use regions and zones to spread risk. Ring balancing and dispersion reports keep placement healthy. Apply erasure coding for capacity efficiency on colder data.
Observability: Export metrics and logs to your monitoring stack. Track latency, error rates, and replication backlogs.
How to Display OpenStack Swift Skills on Your Resume
