Leo Kappeler Education Chair, SNIA Europe

SNIA Europe announces that Leo Kappeler, Director Systems Engineering for the DACH region at Brocade, has joined the association’s Board of Directors.

 He has assumed the position of SNIA Europe’s Education Chair. As the new chair of the education committee, Mr Kappeler will lead SNIA Europe’s Storage Networking Certification Programme (SNCP) aimed at building open and comparable pan-European standards for storage networking certifications. SNIA’s global education and certification programme is an instrumental part of the association’s mission to be the trusted voice of the industry for the storage and datacentre community.
 
SNIA Corporate and SNIA Europe recently partnered with the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) in North America and Europe in order to broaden its reach of SNIA’s education and certification programme. Leo Kappeler will lead the activities in Europe supporting the development and distribution and training and certification. The SNCP programme is the vehicle used to educate, train, and the certification of IT professionals for today’s flexible and shared IT infrastructures, enabling different service-based provisioning models.
 
The Storage Networking Certification Programme is a vendor-neutral process of credentials that complement individual vendor certifications. It is designed to create a uniform certification standard which grades individual skill in various IT disciplines, for example data storage, storage networking, data protection, and interconnecting protocols and interfaces.

Leo Kappeler contributes over 25 years of experience in IT and technology knowledge about Ethernet storage, FCoE, and virtualisation. Complementing his work as Education Chair he will also work closely with the marketing committee, ensuring that SNIA continues to supply its members with the most up-to-date information on current technology trends and SNIA educational programmes.
 
"In spite of the cloud promise, today’s IT infrastructures are the most complex we have ever seen. Best-of-breed is the strategy of choice, which creates an array of solutions, protocols and interfaces, prompting the need to constantly train enterprise staff to stay up-to-date. I am proud to have his unique expertise on the board to broaden our outreach and compliment the current Board of Directors and to fulfil on our mission to educate the market on the evolution and application of storage infrastructure solutions for the data centre. In this role, Leo will provide the vehicle needed to continue to educate end users across Europe," says Bob Plumridge, SNIA Europe Chairman of the Board.

Leo Kappeler adds: "SNIA Europe has an established footprint in all of the important EU countries and I will help to make sure we address specific market issues. We need to tailor our approach to best fulfil the requirements of our members and offer the storage know-how for operating today’s integrated stack of storage, networking and compute," explains the new board member.