EMC or SNIA cert?

jrob48

I have the oppurtunity to get a storage certification and my work is going to pay for requried training. I have experence working with backups and we are mainly an EMC shop so I really like the EMC associate certification.

My questions is for someone with some basic storage knowledge but still pretty green in the area, is the EMC cert too much to take on. I was also looking at the SNIA SCSP cert as an alternative, but the EMC path is most appealing as we mainly work with EMC products.

astorrs

With storage certs I prefer vendor specific over vendor neutral. To me all you're doing is complementing your resume - so if you've worked with EMC in the past and that's where your cert is it's like a feather in the cap.

I'm not hiring a storage admin because of their certs (but for their experience) - I'm okay with a junior network or server admin with limited real-world experience, but no way are you learning with my data - the consequences there are way to far reaching (compared to a network or server outage).

As for your other question (difficulty) the ISM exam is totally doable, there's even a fantastic book specifically written for it: Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information