The challenges of managing growing mountains of data and making it suitable for effective mining is altering the way IT staffs are being trained in some companies. Cross-training among different IT disciplines is becoming more commonplace, reports Computerworld's Lucas Mearian.

IT workers at Translational Genomics Institute are now trained on the interactions among networks, storage and operating systems, said James Lowey, director of network and computer systems at the genome sequencing company. The company adds 2TB of new data each week through the mapping of human genomes, and by the end of the year it could add 10TB a week, Lowey said.

In a similar fashion, IT workers at Sungard, an IT hosting firm, are being trained in the way various components fit into the overall IT operation. Backup administrators, for example, are learning about storage area networks and cloud storage, said Chris McNally, a storage architect Sungard.

"So instead of me being the storage guy who has to argue with these other guys about how this works and what we do, they're now able make intelligent requests with regard to storage," McNally said.

For more:
- see Lucas Mearian's article at Computerworld

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