Certifications in Storage/Virtualization

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Hi there
I'm a new guy and this is my second post here. I want to know if there are certifications available for storage technologies like servers and data centers, clouds and virtualization. I really want to be in a data center, 2 years from now.
Please tell me which certifications are there for that, which one are the best, which one are the worst..etc.

Thanks

 

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I normally use VMWARE for virtulization which is a quite good comparing to sun virtualbox and microsoft virtual PC and microsoft virtual server. Without a doubt VMWARE is one of teh best in the market as far as am concerned. They do have two certification programs one called VCP and the other vcdx.

Check their site at the following address

http://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/certification/

 

TBH there will be no storage certifications worth studying for at the moment for you as until you land such a job you wont know what storage medium they will be using. Its always good to learn the basics of storage though and the vmware VCP coursework does go into the basics of san storage etc so might be worth looking into getting a book or two for vmware, However you may find the pre-requisite course a bit rich to pay for on your own.

There are no real competitors to vmware at the moment other products yes competitors no.

 

Actually I'm more intended to cloud services like Amazon EC2 because they are hardly being touched and I see potential in the near future. Leave apart the potential, I feel some kind of affinity towards the clouds and storage. There is a cert from EMC-2 named "Information Storage and Management" and it's code is E20-001.
Worth?

 

A great deal of money if you go to somewhere using EMC kit, however pretty worthless if you aren't.

I think you may be better getting a general knowledge of fibre, iscsi, luns and the various technologies that are used to integrate them all.

I can tell you that the likes of NetApp and HP all offer SAN based training courses but they will all be vendor specific, better getting something neutral to give you a broader appreciation of everyones technology.

 

your best bet on the storage front would be to peruse SNIA certs, these are platform independent storage certs that cover the concepts behind it all, but not the specific implementation (EMC storage works differently than NetApp storage that works differently from HP Storage)

Storage is one of those areas that will likely require specific training on top of the SNIA stuff (although SNIA is pretty deep stuff)

Bear in mind the the Storage industry is on the cusp of being turned on it's head for the first time in decades.. FC is rapidly falling in popularity to iSCSI, FCoE is going to fill a void, and ultimately cloud based storage and flash are going to change the way we work with HSM and Tiered storage for the foreseeable future, so don't get all hung up on WWNNs and FC-HBA configurations ;)

 

Thanks Simon and Phoenix. And yes, I was wondering about the SNIA certs because I guess they're the only one that aren't vendor specific. Anyways, thanks a lot for your time. I'll keep you posted about my progress

 

Hi

I am a storage consultant and the best advice I can offer you is to do some Linux training, 90% of all storage back ends or virtualisation (storage virtualisation) are based normally on a Redhat derivative, it would also do you no harm to do some networking for iscsi, fibre channel over Ethernet etc.

Steve.L