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/2009/01/01/how-important-will-storage-education-be-in-2009/ http://gminks.edublogs.org/2009/01/01/how-important-will-storage-education-be-in-2009/#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 04:41:20 +0000 gminks http://gminks.edublogs.org/?p=131

A couple of things happened to me over the last few days that have me thinking about storage + education.

I was reading a post from Brian Henderson, one of my colleagues at EMC. Once I got past the 80s’s hair band reference, the post left me with a lot to think about. He talked about his disaster recovery plan for his digital music, videos and pictures.

That made me think about the first house project I’ll be tackling once I graduate: digitizing my vinyl, home videos, and old pictures. We’ll be purchasing some sort of storage and using Mozy to back it up, just like Brian did.

But this little tidbit from Brian’s post really got me thinking:

Matt, who works at a Boston-based videogame company, isn’t a storage geek.  Which explained the blank stare I had from him after my description.

I’ll just imagine that Matt doesn’t actually do coding, or support of the video games. How can you be an IT professional in this day and age and not know about storage? And do you have to be a storage geek to understand why DR (disaster recovery) is important, or at least how it would work?

When I went to get my eyes examined I started thinking about storage again. I pay $30 extra every year to have some digital scan done. I do this so they don’t have to dilate my eyes, and because I think having a digital record of my retinas may come in handy one day (glaucoma runs in my mom’s side). After the doctor did my eyes this year, he couldn’t find my previous records. I asked why, and he say it was probably on the other machine. I looked down, and this big complex piece of machinery seemed to be attached to a great big Dell PC. I guess my previous exams were on the other hard drive that was attached to the other machine. I immediately wondered, why aren’t these images being preserved on some central storage? And what happens if that Dell box dies? And why isn’t the company selling my eye doctor this system helping him out on storing and preserving his patients’ images?

That whole experience made me think of a post Steve Todd had written about Centera being used for storing digitized medical records. To bring it back to education, Steve quoted a Wall Street Journal article that outlines the five broad categories Obama’s to-do list to get us out of this economic mess. Steve concentrated on the fifth item on the list – digitizing health records. If these records get digitized, they have to be stored someplace. Does that mean more people need to understand how information is stored, managed, secured, etc on a storage array?

Back to storage education specifically. For those of you reading this with a technical academic background, did you actually study about storage in college? Did you understand the difference between SAN and NAS from your studies? Do you think its important that college kids (at least the ones in tech major) have exposure to information storage systems?

My organization has actually developed a generic storage curriculum that is taught in lots of colleges. I wish it had been available to me when I was in school.