EMC Proven Certifications

Claymoore

Anyone here have any experience with EMC certifications?

Any advice on books/training materials for SAN configuration in general or EMC SANs in particular?

We got a new toy at work and I want to know what all the buttons do...

HeroPsycho

Check out Brocade's site for free fundamentals of fibre channel:

http://www.brocade.com/education_services/Online_fibrechannelfundamentals.jsp

I know this isn't specifically EMC, but it might help you some (hopefully)...

Claymoore

Thanks Psycho, a link for FREE training is always welcome! I should have started with that site before I bought a couple of Cisco storage networking books last year. Our current SAN fabric is Fibre Channel and I didn't know anything about FC at all when we started meeting with storage vendors, but I have learned a little.

Fortunately we are getting away from Fibre Channel and moving to an iSCSI / NAS infrastructure. We did get some EMC training credits as part of our solution, but I wanted to get a jump on studying so I can try to catch up to our HPUX/SAN Admin and be involved in the implementation beyond just migrating data.

I ordered Using SANs and NAS (O'Reilly) for some background info as well as iSCSI - The Universal Storage Connection (the author sat on the IETF committee that formalized the iSCSI protocol). With free two-day shipping from Amazon they should be waiting for me when I get home. I'll let you folks know what I think of the books after I finish them.

I guess I am just used to Microsoft and Cisco certs where you can find books and plenty of other resources online. EMC either keeps a tight lid on their information or the certification isn't popular (or valuable) enough to create a market for training materials. Would there be enough interest from the other members here to create a separate EMC forum?

HeroPsycho

Personally, I'd rather have a FC SAN than iSCSI, but that's just me.

Claymoore

HeroPsycho wrote:

Personally, I'd rather have a FC SAN than iSCSI, but that's just me.

A fine argument, and one we spent months 'discussing' here.

It all depends on your environment. For us, the substantial cost savings offset any neglible loss in performance. Our biggest challenge is that HP-UX doesn't support iSCSI - they have the initiator software, but it's not widely used. We plan on trying it, but we can always fall back to running our HP-UX servers using NFS drives mounted from the SAN. All our Windows servers will be very happy with iSCSI, even our SQL cluster.

We already had an FC infrastructure, but it was still cheaper for us to ditch that and convert to iSCSI. A Cisco 9222 FC switch (18 FC / 4 GE ports ) costs about $36k, but I can buy 2 Cisco 4948 multilayer switches (one of them 10 GigE!) for about half that. You can run iSCSI over a regular NIC, but an iSCSI Host Bus Adaptor - a NIC with a TCP Offload Engine to process the network traffic itself - only costs about $150 compared to $1500 for a Fibre Channel HBA. Two cards per server times X number of servers and the savings starts to add up. We also replicate data to a remote DR site which means we have to run FC over IP across our WAN as opposed to iSCSI where we just have to route it like any other traffic. That saves us money because of software licensing (mostly) and hardware requirements.

As for performance, the iSCSI book I have claims that once you get to 300 Mbs of bandwidth iSCSI is as fast as a locally attached drive. Also, accessing data directly with iSCSI over an HBA has a 16 time I/O throughput improvement over accessing the same data from an NFS or CIFS share. And since Vista comes with the iSCSI initiator software built in, I can hook my laptop up directly to the SAN - probably useless from a business perspective, but still cool.

HeroPsycho

Not to get into an argument or anything.

iSCSI can be very useful and economical, but FC still rules in performance. Now, of course, if you don't need that performance, iSCSI is a very valid choice.

But price as no object, I'll take FC (with Brocade switches, not Cisco).

Claymoore

Well, I finished the Using SANs and NAS book from O'Reilly and I wasn't very impressed. Curtis Preston also wrote Unix Backup and Recovery and over half of this 200 page SAN book was dedicated to backups. I'm not saying backups aren't important, but the title was Using SANs and NAS - not Backing Up SANs and NAS. Like many technology books, this one also suffers from dated information - it was published in 2003. That was the year iSCSI became an IETF standard so the book only covers iSCSI for half a page in the appendix. It's a decent overview of SAN and NAS technology, but I would only recommend it if you are new to a SAN or NAS environment. After working with a couple of HP XP arrays for a while and a year's worth of vendor meetings for our new solution, there wasn't much new in this book for me. So far the iSCSI book looks more promising.

In case some of you prefer vendor neutral exams like those from CompTIA, there is a vendor neutral SAN cert from the Storage Networking Industry Association. You can check out the link here:
http://www.snia.org/education/certification/
The SCSP cert appears to have all the training information you need available from free downloadable whitepapers here:
http://www.snia.org/education/tutorials/
The SNIA exams are $200 each, but like the EMC certs I have no idea how difficult the tests are or how useful/valuable the cert is. Maybe someone else here has an SNIA cert or has an opinion on it?

HeroPsycho

Judging from the guys I know doing SAN work, vendor centric certs are more valuable than vendor neutral certs. If I were you, I'd be going for Brocade and EMC certs.