I got a 72 (67 is passing). Wow some of these questions are like goldie-oldies—haven’t had to think about them for a long time. I got the iSNS question right – but missed some really basic questions. This practice test is supposed to show you where you need to concentrate your studies….so I guess I need to get cracking!

I have always been more of an application person, so I really don’t remember some of the in-depth disk questions.

So, now its off to study the ISM book – starting with Chapter 1.

So are you studying? Post your practice test score in the comments! Brian is supposed to be doing this too – so we’ll see if he participates.

In case you have forgotten, I develop training for EMC. The latest issue of EMC.now focusing on how our organization has identified a skills gap when it comes to managing information and storage.

The article talks about that gap, and some of the interventions we’ve put in place to help organizations address the gap:

• ISM (Information and Storage Management curriculum and certification – an open curriculum, offered at colleges, that teaches storage and information management basics in a vendor-neutral manner
• ISM Book (there is even a Chinese translation now!) which is based on the course, but offers a really solid introduction into storage and information basics.

We’re talking about it over in the Proven Professional Community. Come join us!

Next week EMC Education will present a free webcast about managing information in challenging economic times. So why is this something you should consider attending?

Background

For the last several years, my organization at EMC has conducted a survey of storage managers and professionals about the challenges facing people that manage the world’s information. Every year our executives present the findings from the survey at EMC World.

Findings

Storage managers marked the lack of skilled storage professionals as one of their pain points this year. Additionally, managers feel that only about 30 percent of their teams are properly skilled to carry out their responsibilities.

Here’s my question: if we have these knowledge gaps in the physical world of information and storage management, what is going to happen when we move this into the cloud? It seems to me that having a strong understanding of how the physical environments work is going to be a necessity once we start virtualizing everything.

Could lack of skilled professionals be a barrier to private cloud adoption?

I’m really proud of  my organization for measuring this gap, and putting together programs to train people to address this problem. We have an open storage curriculum, our Academic Alliance, and even a vendor neutral book on Storage and Information Management.

Sign up for the Webcast!

If you missed EMC World, this is your chance to hear more about this study. Here is how to sign up for the event:

Date: June 26, 2009

Time: 11 AM Eastern

Presenters: Alok Shrivastava, Senior Director, EMC Education Services and Joe Milardo, Director, EMC Education Services

Event Registration

]]> http://gminks.edublogs.org/2009/06/16/emc-education-webcast-managing-information-in-challenging-economic-times/feed/ 0 http://gminks.edublogs.org/2009/05/08/the-information-storage-and-management-book-has-been-officially-released/ http://gminks.edublogs.org/2009/05/08/the-information-storage-and-management-book-has-been-officially-released/#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 15:57:54 +0000 gminks http://gminks.edublogs.org/?p=193

You may remember I invited everyone to get a sneak preview of EMC Education Service’s book about Information and Storage Management back in March. It was interesting doing a “soft launch” of the book over in the EMC Proven Professional Community on ECN.

The book is officially out now. You can go to the EMC Education Services web portal to learn more about where to order the book. The book is so important to Information and Storage professionals because it was written to be a reference book about the technologies required to store, access, manage, and protect information.

40 of my colleagues participated in writing this book. I think its a great tool if this is the sort of work you are involved in.

Check out the official press release, and also what other EMC bloggers think (here and here). And of course come discuss what you think about the need for a reference such as this over in the Proven Professional community.

I just posted the Table of Contents for the ISM (Information and Storage Management) book over in the EMC Proven Professional community. (I posted about the pre-release of the book earlier).

Here are the main chapters, if you want to see the complete Table of Contents you can download it from the community.

1. Introduction to Information Storage and Mangement
2. Storage System Environment
3. Data Protection: RAID
4. Intelligent Storage System
5. Direct-Attached Storage and Introduction to SCSI
6. Storage Area Networks
7. Network-Attached Storage
8. IP SAN
9. Content-Addressed Storage
10. Storage Virtualization
11. Introduction to Business Continuity
12. Backup and Recovery
13. Local Replication
14. Remote Replication
15. Securing the Storage Infrastructure
16. Managing the Storage Infrastructure

Some beefy stuff… it looks like this is going to be a nice reference guide. Just like my green Linux Administration book and my Sun shell programming for Sys Admin books are…only this one is just focused on storage. What do you think?

My organization has written a book about Information and Storage Management, and we’re previewing it over in the EMC Proven Professional community.  The book hasn’t been released yet, so the only place to get a little sneak peek of it right now is to visit the Industry Readiness section of the Proven community.

I’ve written before about the importance of storage education, and really its more than just storage education. Where are we going to find workers trained in end-to-end management of information systems? Who is teaching folks coming out of school topics such as:

• Challenges and solutions for data storage and data management
• Intelligent storage systems
• Storage networking (FC-SAN, IP-SAN, NAS)
• Backup, recovery, and archive (including CAS)
• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Storage security and virtualization
• Managing and monitoring the storage infrastructure

That’s what this book is all about. I know I would have LOVED an end-to-end book like this when I came to EMC straight out of college. How about you?