SNIA turns 10, continues to offer resources for ongoing learning

by David Hill

October 23, 2007 —

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What seems to be the problem? The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) just turned 10 years old. Why should you care about an association that is primarily storage vendor driven? While you benefit indirectly from standards efforts and from improved interoperability among products, the storage field is evolving rapidly and you must stay abreast in order to continue to make the right choices about your storage infrastructure. What about green storage, encryption, data de-duplication, and so on?

What do you need to know? SNIA can help with this learning process. SNIA sponsors (in conjunction with Computerworld) Storage Networking World conferences. These conferences include SNIA Tutorials and Hands-on-Lab programs in addition to the traditional general session and breakout session presentations. Moreover, they have the standard (and ubiquitous) vendor bazaar Exhibit Hall where a large number of products are on display.

Moreover, the SNIA Certification Program is a vendor-neutral certification program for storage networking. The certification program is conducted in partnership with well-known storage vendors.

You can choose one of five areas where you can take an examination and receive a SNIA credential:

* SNIA Qualified Sales Professional

* SNIA Certified Storage Professional

* SNIA Certified Storage Engineer

* SNIA Certified Storage Architect

* SNIA Certified Storage Networking Expert

On a simpler note, SNIA makes available reference material, such as the SNIA Dictionary, which you should have available for reference purposes.

However, there is another way to learn. And that is to keep up to date on a topic of interest to you. You can do that by participating as an end user in SNIA itself. In fact, you can do more than just monitor what is going on. You can also make your desires known as to what is needed and thereby help influence the industry. Vendors like to know that what they are doing is going to be useful to the IT community.

What can you do about it? Storage is a technical specialty that is rapidly evolving. That puts a burden upon you for a continuous learning process in order to keep current. SNIA offers a number of choices that you can take advantage of as part of your learning process. You may well want to do so.

Mesabi Group