Perhaps it’s a sign of how important cloud computing and the data center has become that we’re now seeing master’s degrees solely devoted to data center engineering.

ZDNet’s David Chernicoff reports on the new program at Southern Methodist University:

The degree, based around five core courses, will offer three areas of specialization:

• Facilities, infrastructure and subsystems
• Datasystems engineering and analytics
• Computer networks, virtualization, security and cloud computing

The program is designed to provide an existing datacenter professional a multi-disciplinary approach to the specialized knowledge and practices for both technical datacenter operations and datacenter management. The focus is on modern datacenter engineering practices, with an additional focus on preparing students to take advantage of changes in the future of the datacenter.

In some respects this is just another sign of the growing professionalization of education at American universities, which to be fair is critical given the reality of how short on high tech professionals like engineers the U.S. is. Being able to fully understand the workings of the modern data center requires knowledge of both advanced operations like effective cooling as well as analytics capabilities related to maximizing efficiency at the server level. At least now there may be a university program where engineers can pick up that know how in one place.