This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network (ECN).

Hi everyone! Time for the EMC Proven Professional Roundup! Here are some of the highlights from the past couple of weeks in the Proven  Professional Community:

Welcome all of our new community members!

We’ve had lots of posts in the last couple of weeks from information and storage management “n00bs”. Welcome!! Keep asking your questions about the best certifications for people new to storage, how useful the EMCISA is, and what someone should do once they have the EMCISA. These are great questions!

So if you are new to the industry, and have questions about what to study, or what you need to learn or get experience with to meet your career goals, ask the community your question! Also you can search in this community, we’ve been open here for over a year so maybe your question has been asked before. Also, watch for this round-up – its designed to keep you up-to-date with the cutting edge news in our community and industry.

And if you are an experienced person in our industry – please help out the newbies! Tell your story of how you got to your position – what learning and hands-on experienced helped you get where you are. I know you are reading posts – go ahead and write a comment. You have nothing to lose, and the community would really gain a lot from your insights!

November’s Proven Professional Spotlight is on Ben Dingley

Ben is a Proven Professional who is currently focused on designing and delivering Cloud and Virtual Data Center solutions. He is a 2010 Knowledge Sharing winner for an article that examines what IT departments have to think when they restructure their support models for the virtual data center age. Go learn more about Ben, and check out his article (and tell him hi while you are at it!).

November’s Knowledge Sharing Articles have been posted

Here are the latest Knowledge Sharing articles that have been posted. You’ll need to be a Proven Professional to access the articles in the Proven Professionals ONLY community, or a Powerlink account to access the articles on the EMC Education portal. Links to the articles are here.

• Enterprise Content Management: Yesterday’s Lessons and Today’s Challenges
• The Union of Backup-Based Snapshot Technology and Data Deduplication
• Failure Points in Storage Configurations: From the Application to the Physical Disk
• Scheduling Operations in NetWorker

Want to help write a Proven Professional certification exam?

If you are a certified Proven Professional, you can actually help write the exams! In fact, the exam writing team is looking for help with the Exam Building Workshop for the E20-651 Connectrix Specialist Exam for Platform Engineers. Find out if you are qualified to participate. Fibre channel switches and SAN not your area of expertise? Check out the other areas where they are looking for exam writing participants, or just read more about exclusive Proven Professional benefit of exam building. You must be a Proven Professional to participate. Trouble accessing links? Click here for help.

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• VMware
  • Listen to this video from Chad Sakac from VMWorld  2000 in Copenhagen. If you are interested in how virtualization is presenting new challenges for information and storage management professionals, you’ll learn a lot. (Tip: you don’t have to actually watch it – its over an hour long. Put it on, and listen to it while you are doing something else. I listened to it as I prepared this post! ). It will be interesting to see if any of these issues are addressed in the 2010-2011 Managing Storage Survey…
  • Check out Nick Weaver’s new powershell cmdlet library for EMC Celerra
• Cloud
  • Reflections on the Open Data Center Alliance from Chuck Hollis
  • Chuck also talks about how cloud may really be about how IT can serve users better
  • Chuck also points to out the need for a CFO (chief financial officer) type role for information. Great things to think about if you are plotting out where your career needs to be in a few years…
  • One more for Chuck – what really makes up a Vblock.
  • Chad’s evaluation of the VCE alliance at its 1-year mark
  • Mark Lewis talks about a technology-free cloud. I loved this quote from the article:
    If you make a living from IT, it’s tempting to view “the cloud” as a technology platform–a way to lower costs, meter usage and scale more efficiently. But describing the cloud as a technology platform is like describing Elvis as a ’70s act in Vegas. It’s true, but the significance gets lost.

• From EMC Consulting’s Grace Mollison: post where she talks about the challenges of a architecting a software project using AWS (Amazon Web Services – so public cloud). If you are someone just starting out – these sorts of posts can give you an idea of the skillsets you need to pick up!
• ECM (enterprise content management) is also rapidly changing. Andrew Chapman talks about what is needed to commoditize ECM and he starts with virtual documents.

What were you up to this week?

So who out there has purchased an EMC Proven Professional Starter kit? Don’t forget to sign up your advocate – if you don’t have an advocate I’m sure you can find a Proven Professional here in the community to help you out. Just ask!

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!