The data center is becoming the hub of Information Technology in today’s enterprises. The industry is trending toward software-defined data centers (SDDC), where the majority of infrastructure is virtualized and delivered “as a service”. Such software-configured, hyper-converged data centers allow IT professionals to meet the demands of scaling, performance, capacity and multi-tenancy. This course is an in-depth exploration of the technologies needed to overcome these challenges.

The course introduces the fundamental building blocks of enterprise storage such as SAN, NAS, Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel Over IP (FC/IP), FCoE, and the core concepts of block, file, and object storage. It demystifies today’s storage technologies in flash, cloud, mobility, converged storage, software-defined storage, SDDC, and Big Data storage. The course also covers the blueprint of cloud computing and the implementation of public, private and hybrid cloud storage.

By the end of the course, you will understand the essential storage and network virtualization technologies used in today’s data centers, as well as how to establish a baseline for performance, capacity and ROI.

Learning Outcomes
At the conclusion of the course, you should be able to

• Understand and differentiate between the hard disk drive and Flash Storage technologies
• Recognize various networking technologies such as DAS, SAN, NAS and new Hyper-Converged technologies
• Understand the underlying storage and network storage protocols such as FC, IP, FCIP, iSCSI, FCoE
• Explain how Storage Consolidations and Virtualization works, and how it meets the SLAs, RTOs and RPOs requirements
• Know how the storage Tiering, multi-tenancy, Scale-Out, Scale-Up NAS Clusters works
• Understand the fundamentals of Business Continuity and its asynchronous & synchronous Data Replication methods
• Understand the main sources and attributes of the BIG Data
• Prepare for and embrace future industry trends regarding software defined data centers, cloud storage & services, IoT, and analytics

Note(s): Registered students will be invited to join the NetApp Certified Storage Associate (NCSA) program, which grants them free access to additional online courses and online lab exercises that cover NetApp storage configurations. Students will also receive a voucher applicable toward the NCSA certification exam fee. Participation is optional.

Skills Needed: A basic technical understanding of networking and storage concepts and terminology.