 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and we're live here at IBM Edge, IBM's breakout storage conference. We're in Orlando at the Waldorf Astoria, about 16 to 1800 IBM practitioners, partners, IBMers, and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous production, where we bring you the smartest people we can find. We try to extract the signal from the noise, package it, and provide it to you in real time, on demand, tweet us, I'm at Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host. John MacArthur, President of the Waldorf Technology Partners, great to be here today. Thank you, and we've also got, as a guest here, Howard Goldstein from Howard Goldstein Associates. So Howard, I see you around a lot of conferences, but you came to this one for a very specific reason. So why don't you just tell the CUBE audience why you came today. Well, I partnered with the Storage Networking Industry Association, SNEA, as we all know it, and I've been doing training for them for the last six years. They contract my company to do certification training. So what we suggested was that I would come with SNEA, and I'm sitting next to their booth, and I'm here to promote storage network training, and in particular, there's a new certification from CompTIA, called CompTIA Storage Plus, powered by SNEA. They work together to create this new vendor-neutral certification, and right now, I'm about the only one in the world that has a course. Didn't SNEA have a set of certification programs, and I mean, you were involved in that, right? Actually, about 15 years ago, myself and two other education providers actually created the Storage Networking Certification Program. Jay Kramer, or was it somebody else? No, it was Deborah Johnson of Infinity I.O., Dave Deming of Solution Technology. Okay. All right. So they had a certification program then, so what's the need for a new one? Well, actually, they still have a certification program, some of the more advanced certifications, the management administrator, the solutions architect. Those certifications are in place, but CompTIA is in the certification business, in particularly, marketing business, in terms of marketing certifications. They have A+, network plus, security plus. Their missing link has always been storage. So it was a great synergy to come together and create Storage Plus. So talk about this notion of vendor-neutral certification and storage. I mean, I'm so used to, you're going to get your IBM training, or your EMC training, or your NetApp training, so how do you make it both vendor-neutral and valuable? Well, first of all, vendor-neutral to me doesn't mean vendor-neuter. Okay? Okay. You know, as long, I'm guessing you've used that before. As long, I have. As long as you're representing concepts and can show by example, different vendors implementing those concepts, I think mentioning vendors and giving opinions and stating them as opinions as to which functions you like and which functions you don't like is on limits. So as reference examples, so unlike S&W talks. For example, unlike S&W, you mention references and examples and give opinions. Again. I do too, by the way. That's why they don't let me speak there anymore. Well, number one, I say that they're opinions, so I never represent facts if they're opinions. But the main point is that if you want things to be real, you need to be able to identify vendors that are implementing those functions. Okay. Brocade does zoning a little bit different than Cisco. It's important to point those kinds of things out. I don't understand that nuance. Absolutely. Absolutely. So how critical is the issue of training these days in the storage world? Well, I have three kids that just got out of college. For me, it's very critical. Okay. Because I, you know. Because they didn't learn anything in college, so now they've got to go to the parents. Very good. Training is important. And by the way, I don't want to miss the reason you brought up the vendor neutral question. SNEA actually has worked with these vendors and they identify the fact that 80 to 90% of all the training exists in all the vendors' products. Why bring people through that training many, many times with many, many vendors? So many vendors actually look at the CompTIA storage plus credential as meeting their basic requirements so that people don't have to take that over again. So it ultimately becomes a savings for the end user. If the end user is interested in the more advanced certification levels that really tie in more specific to what's happening with each vendor, those programs are still there. But this vendor neutral credential, if you will, is recognized by other vendors as being valid as well. And who is the prototypical recipient of the training and the certification? Is it a classical storage? When we define that certification program, the audience, or the market, if you will, are all storage practitioners. And this certification level, whether you take training or not, there's no requirement to take training to achieve the certification level, unlike other certification programs that exist. So if you've got a lot of experience, you can pass the test without any training at all. So it's a set of tests? The process is there's a blueprint that's created out of job specifications. Training companies go one way with that blueprint and develop training. Certification companies go one way and develop certification questions. So it's like the college level examination program of my youth, where you could clap out of years of college based upon what you had. I didn't know they had certifications back in Abe Lincoln's time. No, they didn't. I think, okay. So Howard, I'm curious as to what you're hearing from your constituent base. So you're hearing a lot about new forms of innovation, big data, cloud, and requiring new forms of skills. So you're hearing things like cloud architect, data scientist, a lot of talk about DevOps. What do you tell the classic storage administrator who's become very proficient in things like lung management and then everybody's saying, hey, we want to make storage invisible? That's very threatening to me as a storage manager. So how do I respond to that and what's my future? I'll say this, Dave, okay. There are very few epiphanies in this world, okay. Everything new is everything old in a different form. So the basic skills that people have in the storage arena still need to be performed. Even in cloud, somewhere there's a lung provisioning going on, okay. So it doesn't go away. It perhaps is made invisible by some virtualization software or some part of the cloud services. But those concepts of creating space that's presented to an application eventually still is there. So you're sort of squint, helping us squint through the vendor marketing, right? Which is, so it's not like I don't have to do those things anymore. Well, you know, my friend, John Twigo, talks about architecture versus architecture. And understand that there are marketing terminologies which by the way, terminology is my hot button. I consider myself to be a semantic analyst. I didn't say analyst, okay, I said analyst. And terminology is important, especially in my storage plus course, where we're covering the basics. Those things don't change. Architecture kind of gets in the way sometimes of understanding what's really going on. Classic example if I might, okay. People talk about bandwidth being a bigger pipe. It's not a bigger pipe. It's that the data is skinnier, okay. People talk about high speed networking having something to do with bandwidth. You can't go faster than the speed of light. So, architecture gets in the way. The fiber channel industry association. I hear IBM's working on that problem, by the way. There we go, okay. They talk about 16 gig and they show as a marketing metaphor a souped up sports car. High speed, it has nothing to do with bandwidth, all right. So, what I try to do, especially in the training that I do, is bring some sense to what's really going on and explain the technology using metaphors but appropriate metaphors so that people actually have an understanding. Do you feel like, how do your constituents react to that because they're getting inundated, like never before with marketing messages around race cars and things that evoke emotion. How do they respond to that? Are they thankful? Are they cognizant of it already? Well, are they embarrassed? Are they not taken? First of all, some see me as Don Quixote, okay. Battling this never ending battle. Some think are very skeptical, okay. You're never going to be able to do it, Howie. But you see, I'm able to do things that perhaps others aren't able to do. And so that's my constant vigil. Especially in a training mode, is I want to bring, and it's not a matter of the truth because it's not a truth or lie issue. It's just confusion that's out there and a lot of people have learned things through people who use metaphors that don't even understand how the metaphor actually applies. That happens over time and what you gotta do is you gotta come back and you gotta say, hey, here's what the technology is really doing and you're providing a service. I look at myself as providing a service. What are some of your favorite examples of people overstating? Oh, here's a good one. The Ethernet Mac, come on. If I was to say to you, my Mac, you'd say address. I would say, oh, I'd say my son's Mac. Oh, there we go, okay. Well, I'm talking about technology. There's no such thing as a Mac address. It's a Mac identifier. It's like a serial number of the port. People think, even in the storage development arena, they think that everything has to have an address. It doesn't, okay. There are other ways of being able to find the location of something. Well, that's a classic example, fiber channel disks. There's no such thing as a fiber channel disk. There's a fiber channel interface on a disk that's implementing the SCSI protocol, the reads, the writes, the inquiries. People are confused by that because nobody sits down other than me and explains the difference between a network or an interface and the actual device itself. See, I'm getting excited. Yeah, this is good. Howard, how much of your work and your curriculum delves into the security aspects? I talk about security. I talk about all the places where security needs to be done. I talk about data at rest. I talk about data in flight. But that's just one aspect that I talk about. Maybe about one lecture in a five-day course. So the reason my question is, we were talking earlier when you made the statement that, look, what's new has really been done before. It still needs to be done. My sense is, and I'd be interested in your feedback on this, is security is actually something that is changing with things like virtualization and abstraction layers. And you don't know what connects to what anymore. It's hard to find. When things change and move around in a virtual environment, I can't move fast enough, my brain doesn't move. Who are you? So I am an admin. Let's say I'm a VMware admin or a storage admin. I don't know which drive connects to what port connects to which network address. It's all sort of invisible to me. Well, again, invisible is a metaphor. It's non-invisible. Something knows, and what you have to do is you have to identify what are the component parts that bring you that function. And if you're having a problem, for example, of data is getting exposed, then it becomes a problem determination process and getting the right people involved. Yeah, right. So I might have to bring in a team of scientists to figure it out. Well, you know, I wouldn't exaggerate, okay? Yeah, it's not a team of scientists. It's probably people that sit on your own staff that get involved in that sort of thing. But it's resource that I need to apply. I will tell you this. And again, this is self-serving, but kudos to education, you know, you can learn what the component parts are so that you can answer that question, even in the most virtualized, cloudish environment that you have. You know, people that need to know, hopefully know, within your organization. And for you, the admin, we can at least provide some insight into the components that are part of that solution so that you can call the right person. That's how I see it. Right. I wonder in the context of the rapid rate of change within the infrastructure, there's anyone who actually knows, other than the system itself. I mean, I think things within the system have to know. Well, you know, I think that's a well-spoken fact, okay? But people know what the components are that know. And hopefully there are tools built into those components so that if you need to get that question answered, you can. Yeah. People may think it's more magical than they actually are. Right. But people also want to express that they know things or that they may not know, because it's also job preservation, so. That's interesting. People express that they know things that they may not know. That they actually don't know or may want to deny the answer. We see this in disaster recovery planning. Okay. Oh, sure. We can recover from the disaster. We run our tests four times a year, you know, and as long as it's not a real disaster, it's fine because you did lots of careful pre-planning, planning around the disaster test, and you're ready for that disaster test as opposed to sort of real time. If people, number one, have a need to know and they claim that they know when they don't know, then they're either lucky or they're fired. Yeah. Maybe. All right. Hey, can I tell you why I'm really here? Yeah, please. Okay, okay. Thank you. I'm here with the SNIA booth, and since I'm the vendor that actually writes the courses and teaches the courses, we came up with an idea, which is why not help marketing those courses. So I'm here at the SNIA booth. We're giving away free training, part one of my video recorded four course series on Storage Plus. So if you just come by at the booth, we'll give you part one free, no strings attached. If you want the other three parts, either to just gain the knowledge that you need to work in this industry, or if you got a more specific objective, which is passing the CompTIA Storage Plus powered by SNIA exam, we'll help you. And by the way, an emphasis on hands-on training at the Technology Center in Colorado Springs. Howard Goldstein, go to hgai.com. Congratulations on your success. Thank you. And thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks. Thank you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back. This is IBM Edge. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this.