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

Here in the States, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is pretty much this week’s Friday. So everyone gets the bonus of an early EMC Proven Professional Roundup! Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

New exam building workshop/review dates are posted

If you are a certified Proven Professional, the schedule is posted through April.

Use this link to troubleshoot access problems.

New EMC Academic Alliance University Spotlight

November’s University Spotlight is on Ball State University. Learn how Ball State University prepares Master’s candidates to face the challenges of managing data – using the EMC Information and Management course.

Are any of you Ball State University students or alumni?

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• Cloud
  • Chuck Hollis talks about the challenging transition ahead of us as we move to real cloud environments
  • Dustin Smith of the Exchange in the Private Cloud blogs about a white paper that shows how to deploy Exchange on an Iomega IX12
• Virtualization
  • Gregg of EMC Consulting posted a HUGE All Things Virtual roundup
  • Virtual Winfrastructure has links to three new EMC solutions docs for Microsoft Hyper-V
• Steve Todd blogs about his time at the RSA Archer roadshow <– good read if you are interested in IT governance
• Certification Exams
  • I announced on my blog I’m planning to take the E20-001. Who wants to help me study?
  • Jas Dhaliwal blogged about his experience with the VCAP-DCD datacenter design course & exam

What were you up to this week?

It’s almost December everyone! If you are studying to take an exam this quarter — its crunch time! Make sure you let the community know if you need some help or encouragement.

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

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

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

Who is studying for the EMCISA?

Byte posted a nice wrap-up of study resources. I’ve decided to take this exam before the end of the year, I’ll be blogging about my experience. Stay tuned for details!

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• VMWare
  • Chad Sakac posted the slides and recording from this week’s Atlanta VMUG – they talked about storage and VMware best practices.
  • Great posts from Proven Professional TechHead this week…PPT and visio VMWare images, and vChat 11 covered vSphere questions and free tools.
  • Gregg’s blog (EMC CONSULTING) has the breakdown of what it was like to sit in the VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security Course.
• Cloud
  • Virtual Winfrastructure has a post about their new white paper about virtualizing Exchange on Hyper-V
• Chuck Hollis talks about EMC’s Isilon acquisition
• Chuck also talks about PowerPath <— if you are new to PowerPath or if you are starting to virtualize your servers, you should check out this article!
• Proven Professional Steve Todd talks about designing an IT infrastructure that can support innovative applications...things like embedding smart chips in running shoes.

What were you up to this week?

In the US we’re getting ready for a holiday next week…will any of you be studying?

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

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!

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

Hi everyone! Sorry its been a few weeks since we had a round-up. I took a couple of weeks off to get married. But now its time to get back into the swing of things! Lots of stuff happening that Proven Professionals may be interested in, so lets get started!

Here are some of the highlights from the past couple of weeks in the Proven  Professional Community:

EMC Proven Professional Advocacy Program

If you are a certified EMC Proven Professional, become an advocate for the storage industry! Learn more in the Proven Professionals ONLY community.

If you are not yet a certified EMC Proven Professional, check out the EMC Proven Professional Starter kit. It has everything you need to get started — and you know the community will be here for you as you start the process!

Set up your access for the Proven Professionals ONLY community!

If you are a certified EMC Proven Professional, its very very important to get your access set so that you are able to access the exclusive Proven Professionals ONLY community. Its really very simple:

• Your ECN email address and your CertTracker email address must match
• If you use Powerlink to log into ECN, your Powerlink email address, your ECN email address and your CertTracker email address must match

• Why should you visit the Proven Professionals ONLY community? Once you are in, you can…
  • Find details about the Advocacy program
  • Sign up to help write new certification exams
  • Read Knowledge Sharing articles from the past few years
  • Sign up for live knowledge sharing events, or browse the library of previously recorded events (trust me, you do not want to miss the next Engineer to Engineer webcast!!)
• Need help figuring out if your email address are aligned? Click here.

New Information Intellegence Group (IIG) Proven Professional certification credential

The IIG team (formally known as Content Management) announced a new certification credential: Application Developer, EMCApD Content Management xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) Specialist Version 1.0.

Abstract submissions for the Knowledge Sharing Competition are now closed

Good luck to everyone who submitted an abstract! If you have any questions about the process, see this document or contact ddProven.

New University Spotlight

This month’s university spotlight is on the International Institute of Information Technology. Are you a student, or an alumnus? Check out the great work those students are doing as they study information and storage management.

Blog posts of interest to Proven Professionals

• Cloud
  • Chuck Hollis gives us an Atmos update
  • Yo Delmar has an interesting post about business processes, monetization, and the cloud
  • Chad Sakac covers the UIM (Unified Information Manager) 2.0 release
  • Proven Professional Steve Todd talks about his award-winning entry to the EMC Innovation Conference
  • Proven Professional Mark Storagezilla Twomey gets the scoop from Greenplum co-founder/CTO of EMC’s Data Computing Product division Luke Lonergan
    • More on Greenplum from Chuck Hollis
  • Proven Professional Lawrence Hart gives his opinion of what the leadership changes at Documentum mean
• VMware
  • Gregg’s blog has a great post on updgrading from ESX,VMware Update Manager and Virtual Centre 4.0 to Version 4.1
  • Gregg also has a nice wrap-up of VMworld Europe
  • Chad Sakac posted on Oct 8 about all the jobs available in this space… most of them sound like a sweet spot for Proven Professionals!
  • Chad also posted a reference doc for Citrix XenDesktop 4 on EMC Unified, leveraging NFS updated to incorporate the required info for FAST Cache, FLARE 30 and DART 6.0.
    • He also posted links to a PowerShell commandlet library and a PowerCLI cheat sheet.
  • TechHead posts a link to a fee NTP time service
  • Proven Professional Nick Weaver posted a GUI tool that configures the DHSM setup for the Celerra and Unified plug-ins. During the EMC Innovation Conference. Insane!
• Storagezilla also posts a nice comparison between NFSv4 and NFSv3

WHEW! That was a lot! I promise not to get this behind again…

What were you up to this week?

Share your week with us…if you are in the northern hemisphere are you enjoying the fall weather? Those of you in the southern hemisphere – how is spring coming along? I know lots of you are studying – let the community know if you need support or help!

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

This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

The 2011 Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing Competition is now accepting Abstracts!

You do not have to be a Proven Professional to submit an abstract, but if your abstract is selected for the competition you will need to acheive your certification by the time you submit your paper. Prizes are available – including a free trip to EMC World (and this year its in Vegas!).

What are you waiting for? Get the details here.

In semi-related news, ddProven finally has an avatar!

Interesting Community Posts

• The eSeminar on reclaiming SAN storage was this week. Keep watching this document for the recorded session. Acess Issues? Try this doc.
• Are any of you in Isreal? Someone is looking for the Proven Professional  community there…..help him out!

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• VMware
  • Go vote for your favorite virtualization blogs
  • Nickapedia has posted a new Celerra VSA
  • vChat Episode 7 is up
  • PowerCLI 4.1 poster (via Techhead)
  • If you want to a job with the vSpecialists, this is the post you want to read!
• Should storage be viewed as a commodity?
• EMC is the #1 choice for VMware
• Greenplum is also hiring
• EMC’s plans for IT as a Service

Did I miss a good community or blog post? Add it in the comments please!

What were you up to this week?

We are so close to the end of Q3 – how is everyone doing? Who is studying? Let folks in the community know if you need some help, or just some encouragement!

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

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

This week’s Roundup is going to be a short one, we should be back to our normal schedule next week!

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

Next Knowledge Sharing eSeminar is next week!

If you a Proven Professional, and you are interested in learning more about reclamation of SAN storage, sign up for the Knowledge Sharing eSeminar scheduled for Sept 14. More details here.

Were you at the Toronto EMC Forum?

Candace was, and she has posted pictures to the Proven Professional Facebook Fan page. You can find more pictures on the EMC Forums page. Next up: New York. Who’s going?

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• Roy Mikes shares this year’s book of Knowledge Sharing abstracts – his Knowledge Sharing article was published in it!
• From Jas Dhalliwal (from EMC Consulting): ITIL and the Private Cloud

What were you up to this week?

We are at the end of Q3. Who is studying?

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

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

Obviously I’m running a little late this week, sorry about that folks! This will be a condensed version of the roundup. If you have come across links you think other Proven Professionals should be aware of, please share them in the comments!

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

Engineer to Engineer (E2E) Webinars

We had two E2E webinars last week, one on Unisphere and one on new advanced storage efficiency technologies. We will be adding the Q&As and the recorded sessions to the documents as soon as they are available.

You must be a Proven Professional to access this content. If you are having problems, please use this troubleshooting document.

IDC cites impact of Proven certification. How does it impact you?

How has your Proven Professional certification impacted your career? Join the crowd who have already chimed in on this question!

Some answers so far:

• Broader understanding of technology for understanding how to architect and deploy management systems
• Better understanding of security requirements for storage and virtualization (from 2 very experienced folks)
• Helped to fill in the storage gaps for a virtualization guru
• Several managers have chipped in that saying a Proven credential will get your resume to the top of the pile
• Providing a broad understanding of our industry (from a newbie)
• Providing insight about the student audiences from someone who is writing training for EMC
• Broader understanding of SANs

Do you agree with this? Do you have something different to share? Don’t be shy!

Support questions

Make sure if you have a question about a production environment that you ask your question in the EMC Support Forums. We love helping everyone out, but you’ll get more relevant help (and usually a faster response!) if you ask your support questions in the Support Forum community.

What were you up to this week?

Is everyone else as busy as we are this week? I hope you are still finding time to study and learn the things you need to learn to become a Proven Professional Associate, Specialist, or Expert. If not, come ask for help in the community!

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

This post has been cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network.

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven Professional Community:

University Spotlight

The University Spotlight highlights one of the universites involved in the EMC Academic Alliance program. This month, the spotlight is on Georgia Southern University.There is a VMware IT Academy Center at GSU! Go read about professor (and Proven Professional) Dr. Timur Mirzoev, and listen to the recorded webinar that was held by EMC Education Services and Dr. Mirzoev on Digital Universe in the Cloud : Preparing Your Students for Careers in IT.

IDC cites impact of Proven certification. How does it impact you?

Speaking of being prepared for careers in IT…..the IDC white paper The Proven Professional Certification – Proving Certification Can Profit cited the impact of the Proven Professional certification program on the storage indutry skill gap. How does this impact you? We need your stories! Please add your Proven Professional story here!

Proven Benefit: Participate in Exam Building Workshops

If you have a Proven Professional certification, you are eligible to help write new Proven Professional exams. The schedule of exams the team needs participants for is located in this document in the Proven Professionals ONLY community. More information on eligibility for the exam building program, see this discussion.

If you are a Proven Professional, and are have problems accessing the exam building links, please use this troubleshooting document.

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• Steve Todd is going to be a manager, and is expecting his new reports to become Proven Professionals!
• VMware
  • Here’s a list of all the VMware Twitter accounts
  • Gregg’s Blog (of EMC Consulting) has a great virtual round-up for all your VMware social media information needs.
  • Roy Mikes posted how to connect your iPad to VMware View
  • Techhead posted that vChat episode 3 is up, and its about vSphere home labs
• Alexander Holt (of EMC Consulting) talks about troubleshooting scripts (and the importance of remember the basics)
• Jas Dhalliwal (of EMC Consulting) explains the basics of an attack on a cloud, and mechanisms available to protect against that.
• Did you know there are two new SCSI commands? Barry Burke blogs about them here, and explains what they have to do with storage reclamation.

Did everyone survive Friday the 13th? I know from the post on the Proven Professional Facebook Fan page wall that lots of people are studying for Proven Professional certification exams, make sure to ask questions in the community if you need clarification on anything. We are a community of experts, we should be helping each other close that storage skills gap!

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

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

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

New EMC Proven Professional Credentials

• Ok, this one isn’t new…but the Associate Proven professional credential was renamed. It is now the EMC Information Storage Associate credential (EMC ISA).
• This one is new: EMC SourceOne for Microsoft SharePoint Administrator

Videos about the impact of becoming a Proven Professional

We posted several new videos. Some of them are interviews with individuals who share their  thoughts on the benefits they have seen from becoming an EMC Proven Professional. This discussion has links to all the new videos. You can also find these videos on our YouTube channel.

What is the #1 challenge of storage managers?

I tweeted this question during our EMC Live webinar this week about Solving the Information Storage Problem. I posted all the responses here (some of them are pretty funny). Did you miss the webinar? We’ll post the link to the recording of the event as soon as its ready in this document.

Do you have advice for someone studying for the EMC ISM exam?

Muneer from Quatar is studying, and has asked for advice. Richard Butler (one of EMC’s awesome instructors) offered some great tips. For those of you who have just cleared this exam, what advice do you have for Muneer?

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• Proven Professional Lawrence Hart is now publishing his Documentum tips in a blog here on ECN, so its searchable by community members.
• Jas Dhalliwal (of EMC Consulting) talks about a billion-node machine
• Nick (one of the vSpecialists) details his experience getting his CCNP
• vChat episode 2 is up
• EMC’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kathrin Winkler has a thought-provoking post about corporate social responsibility in the IT industry

Can you believe its already August? I know lots of you are studying, keep up the hard work! What sorts of projects are you working on at work (or is everyone but me on vacation!!!)

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

This post cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network.

I missed writing the round-up last week – did y’all miss me? So this week you get an extra-beefy round-up!

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

Community Announcements

• If you participated in the World Wide Proven Professional Day 2010 online event, we finally got your shirts in! We also shipped them out, so I’m hoping to see lots of #redshirt picture very soon!
  For those of you who are new to the community, every year at EMC World, one day is designated as the Proven Professional day. We announce the winners of our Knowledge Sharing article competition, and every Proven Professional in attendance wears the same color Proven Professional polo shirt. This year we thought – hey we interact with lots of Proven Professionals who may not be able to make it to EMC World, how can we include everyone in the Proven Professional day celebrations? And World Wide Proven Professional Day was born! This being our first year, we learned some lessons about getting prizes out to everyone…so we’ll see what we do for World Wide Proven Day in 2011.
• Are you a SourceOne guru? There was a new SourceOne Microsoft SharePoint Administrator credential announced. Check it out here.
• We have someone new in the Proven Spotlight – Rajaneesh Sasidharan. Go read his story and say hi to him here.
• There were 3 new Knowledge Sharing articles released today as well. Topics include multi-homing for Networker, how to build a knowledge management system, and how to shrink CLARiiON luns. If you are a Proven Professional, or if you have a Powerlink account, find the articles in the August section of the Publication Schedule document.
• Did you complete the ECN Survey? What are you waiting for? Someone’s gonna win an iPAD!!!

August 4 EMC Live Webcast – Solving the Information Storage Challenge

The next EMC Live Webcast about Solving the Information Storage Challenge is August 4. Hope to “see” you there! Registration details here.

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• Cloud:
  • On Brian Power’s Power Windows blog, guest blogger Dominick Dequarto ponders To cloud or not to cloud.…A nice post on the new challeges today’s data center managers face.
  • Jas Dhalliwal of EMC Consulting continues the famous-quote-as-a-blog-post-title theme with Ask not what you can do for your cloud, but what your cloud can do for you! Interesting post on the impact clouds (public and private) have on applications.
  • Grace Mollison of EMC Consulting has a really interesting post about using Cloudwatch to manage an AWS environment
  • Storagezilla links to a well-documented real world Atmos application. If you are wondering what cloud computing means from a technical application point of view, you may want to check this out.
• VMware:
  • VMworld is coming up – if you can’t make it, follow the tweets of those who are attending the conference
  • Simon Phillip of EMC Consulting has an interesting post about VMware HA file locking
  • Gregg’s blog has a wrap-up of the most interesting articles in the VMware universe
  • The chief Virtual Geek posted a calendar of upcoming EMC/VMware webcasts.
• New bloggers:
  • The “Storage Anarchist” introduced a new EMC blogger – the Storage Savvy blog. What does everyone think – should we add this blog to the Favorite Blogs list?

What were you up to this week?

We are 1/3 of the way through Q3. I know for a fact several of you are studying for certification exams. Keep the questions coming, we’re here for you! For you old-timers, feel free to jump in and encourage folks who are prepping to become Proven Professionals this quarter!

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