From what I understand about the storage server it is ‘normal’ Enterprise Oracle 11g on Linux using ASM storage – there is nothing new at a query / ETL level – the database query optimizer knows how to exploit the hardware so that we do not need to! So any good grounding in Oracle DW methods such as partitioning, bitmap indexes, segment compression, the use of ASM, etc will still be good for Exadata storage. At a systems level, there may be need for some new skills, but I think that is a small increment over the skills of good Linux admin person