I have been putting off posting about this — but I don’t think I can avoid it much longer.

I’m going to start studying to take the EMC ISM (E20-001) Proven Professional exam. Hopefully I’ll sit for the exam before the end of the year.

Why am I doing this? I already have a Proven Professional Specialist certification (EMCIE SAN). But the EMCISA Associate credential came out after I took the associate exam required for my EMCIE.

So I figured, what the heck! I should probably get the new credential. Plus, I talk to so many folks in the Proven Professional community about getting this credential…I thought I’d go through it again. Feel their pain.

Not so sure that is a good idea…. :O

I already have a few people agreeing to study with me….who else wants to join our club? I wonder if we could do some studying using twitter……………..hmmmm……….

So first things first. I’m going to take the practice exam. That should point out my weak areas. My guess would be backups….when I was doing backups I was also maintaining scripts for them…I think things have changed a bit.

Once I figure out my weak areas, the plan is to go through the ISM book chapter by chapter till I feel ready. I’ll post how I do on the practice test (as well as if I need to change my study strategy!!) in a couple of days.

OK — wish me luck!! Or, better yet,  join me in the endeavor!

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

Miss a past issue of the Proven Professional Update?

Not to worry! We’ve posted them in the Proven Professionals Only community!

Access issues?

The exam team has updated the exam building workshop/review schedule

If you are a Proven Professional, why not help us write/review new revisions of the Proven Professional certification exams?

Access issues?

What do you do once you have passed the EMCISA?

We had a couple of community members ask this question this week. What do you think? Go share your experience here or here. Or if you have a totally different request for help, please start a new discussion!

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• EMC Consulting has posted some open positions
• Cloud
  • Chad Sakac has pointed out that many solutions docs are available on vce.com, including the one he posted on View 4.5 via NFS/FAST Cache on Vblock 1
  • EMC Replication Enabler for Exchange and Microsoft Hyper-V from Dustin Smith from the Exchange in the Private Cloud blog
  • Nice post from SharePoint in the Private Cloud that touches on the silos that exist currently in the data center (and how we’re gonna have to do something about that as we virtualize everything!)
  • vChat from VMworld Europe was about the lab in the cloud
• vSpecialist Scott Lowe also does a tech roundup!
• Storagezilla has a post about security and encryption
• Just starting out your career in information and storage management? Read Chuck’s post about backups to get some insights on why you need to learn how to do lots more than just configure the backup software your company is using.
• Steve Todd has a post on how EMC engineering is working to “componetize” things

What were you up to this week?

I know for sure lots of you are studying – let us know if you need any help! And be sure to answer requests for help from your fellow community members, that is what this is all about!

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:

eSeminar – reclaiming SAN storage

The link to the recording of this eSeminar has been posted in the Proven Professionals ONLY community. (Access issues?)

Knowledge Sharing 2011

Have you submitted an abstract yet?

Can you help out a fellow Proven Professional?

Why not share your expertise, and chime in on some of these open discussions?

• For you CLARiiON experts, someone has some naviseccli questions
• Its still not too late to comment on how your Proven Professinal certification has impacted you personally
• Are you a Networker Specialist? Can you advise someone who is just starting down that certification path?
• If you are one of the many Proven Professionals who accessed the Engineer to Engineer webinar on Unisphere in the Proven Professionals ONLY community, did you see that Kristine Cornwall is asking for your input into a new Unified community here on ECN? (Access issues?)

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• VMware
  • What you need to know if you are planning to attend VMworld Copenhagen
  • EMC product support for vSphere 4.1
  • Chad is asking for input on what to talk about.. see his blog or visit the Everything VMware at EMC community here on ECN
  • Proven Professional Nick Weaver talks about VMFS datastores and Symmetrix SRDF-S
  • Nick also maintains a great Twitter list of the vSpecialists
  • Check Gregg’s blog for this week’s “All Things Virtual” to get all the virtual news of the past week
• Proven Professional Mark “Storagezilla” Twomey gives info about the upcoming NFSv4.1/pNFS BakeAthon
• Mark also has a great post about “fog”, which links to a paper on how to tell if your files that live in the cloud are vulnerable to disk drive crashes
• Mark also wants to know what you have in your home lab – comment here
• Proven Professional Steve Todd talks about the challenges of designing storage interfaces when the people using them may be storage novices
• For you Documentum users out there, Proven Professional Laurence Hart gives a nice round-up of what happened during this year’s EMC Writer’s Summit

What were you up to this week?

Share your week with us! I know its the end of the quarter, but why not take a break and be social here in the community! If you are feeling nervous about posting, why not start by just introducing yourself to everyone?

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 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

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

EMCISA

The credential for the EMC E20-001 exam is now the EMC Information Storage Associate. Read all about it in this document.

Does this renaming affect you? What do you think about the new name?

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• VMware released vSphere 4.1, so there are a ton of blogs on that:
  • Cross-EMC platform support with vSphere 4.1
  • The Impact of VMware Storage Integration
  • Gregg’s Blog on the EMC Consulting page rounds up all the vSphere 4.1 news
• A new place to keep up with all things virtual is vChat
• Need a tool to give you more info than you get from perfmon? Check out perfcollect.
• We know our industry is changing rapidly. Here’s a great post about different ways to manage storage
• Private Cloud Practioner’s Guide.

ECN Downtime TONIGHT

ECN will be unavailable tonight, July 16 from 8PM ET to 10 PM ET.

What were you up to this week?

What is everyone up to this week? Studying? Is it your first time to the Proven Professional Community? Please be sure to introduce yourself!

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:

Knowledge Sharing Articles

The July articles were released last week. In case you missed it, topics ranged from DLP (data loss prevention) to email archiving and retention to deduplication to DR (disaster recovery). Check out this year’s publication schedule for more info.

There were also some good comments on one of this year’s winning articles: SAN Performance – Getting the Most ‘Bang’ for your Buck. If you have read the article, what do you think about John’s methodology for documenting, analyazing, remediating, and reviewing all elements of your SAN? (I thought it was a really good article – could have used something like this 5 years ago when I was working as a sys admin).

New Proven Professional Certifications announced

• EMCIE Backup and Recovery – Avamar Specialist Certification
• EMCSA Backup and Recovery – Avamar Specialist Certification

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

As usual, Proven Professionals are blogging about the cutting edge topics in the information and storage management industry:

• Mark Twomey blogged about EMC’s latest acquisition: Greenplum. If you are interested in MPP (massivly parallel processing) make sure you check out this post.
• Lee Dallas has a post about what the Greenplum acquisition will mean for Documentum.
• Roy Mikes has a post this week about the EMC 20% Guarantee. The post includes a couple of funny videos.

Did I miss a good post? Let me know in the comments.

Housekeeping

Please remember to mark your questions answered once they’ve been answered, and assign points to the people who helped you out. You never know when we’ll decide to do something with those points!

Why did you get Proven? Last call to participate in the poll.

What were you up to this week?

We’ve completed the first week of Q3. Who has been goaled to get a new Proven Professional certification this quarter? We’re here if you have questions on how to get started, ask away in the Proven Advisor: Ask Us section of the community.

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

This post is cross-posted from a post in the EMC Proven Professional Community on ECN.

EMC Announcements

There were many announcements, but probably one of the biggest was the VPLEX announcement. Bas Raayman has a great wrap-up of that specific announcement, and Christopher Kusek has a nice wrap-up of many of the other announcements.

World Wide Proven Professional Day

I was excited to see all the ways people were spending Proven Professional Day. In case you missed it, go check out the Flickr pictures that everyone uploaded! It was also great to hear what people were doing on this thread. We had over 30 entries from 10 countries – it was a truly global event! We heard from people from Australia, India, the US, Italy, Egypt – all over the place!

We even gave away raffle prizes to 2 remote participants during the event in Boston.

On this day in Boston, everyone was wearing a red shirt – every where you looked. As people filed in to the room for the Knowledge Sharing Ceremony, we were displaying a Twitter stream using TweetChat. I was amazed at the people tweeting that I didn’t know!

One of my favorite moments was during this TwitterChat, someone made fun of the shirts, reminding us all what happens to the people who wore red shirts in Star Trek. What did the community do? Rallied behind the shirts, creating the hashtag #redshirts. I just love geeks!!

Read about the winners of the Knowledge Sharing Awards in this thread. Check out the pictures on Flickr: [Set 1] [Set 2] We also have videos from EMC World on YouTube.

Securing Storage in the Cloud

Community member Charlie Brooks gave a great Birds of a Feather session: Securing Storage in  the face of V12n and The Cloud. He has posted his slides, go check them out and join the discussion.

Managing Storage: Trends, Challenges and Options 2010 – 2011

Alok Shrivistava gave his annual presentation about the results of our survey of storage managers and storage professionals. My notes from the presentation are here. The study is available from this page.

Wrap-ups

You can check out our wrap ups from EMC World as well: [Day 1] [Day 2] [Day 3]

What about you?

What did you see at EMC World? Did you like having the chance to participate remotely if you couldn’t make it to Boston? Should we do that again?

Does anyone have links, pictures or videos I missed?