Preparing for future data center professionals: Integrating storage technology into the Computer Information Technology curriculum

Information brings economic value to the customers and data is the "soul" of the enterprise. Data centers are playing more and more important roles in the enterprises. Storage technology is one of the fundamental technologies behind data centers. The storage knowledge and skills are needed for data center professionals. Thus, we have developed a new course, Storage Administration, for Computer Information Technology (CIT) major students at Northern Kentucky University (NKU). Since our CIT program emphasizes hands-on learning, we have developed the course based on hands-on laboratory components. The laboratory components are developed based on open source software and simulator software. In this paper, we describe the hands-on laboratory components in details.