If your paycheck seems a little heftier this year, you're not alone among other storage professionals. IT staff members who spend at least a portion of their time working with storage reported an average salary of $80,892 for 2006--about 4.3% more than last year--according to Storage magazine's annual Storage Salary Survey.

That raise is right in line with national IT-wide statistics, and represents a modest jump in the mostly flat salaries over the past three years. "The mean national salary for storage administrators with a SAN specialty was $80,500," says David Foote, CEO of Foote Partners LLC, a New Canaan, CT-based research firm that focuses on IT skills and compensation. "SAN people are on our hot list right now," he adds.

Whether the slight spike represents the beginning of an upward trend in storage salaries remains to be seen, but industry experts see storage as one of the most in-demand IT sectors.