NetApp Academic Alliances Program

As part of its Academic
Alliances program, NetApp, Inc. is
launching a new NetApp Certified Storage Associate (NCSA) certification,
underscoring its commitment to providing educational opportunities for students
of IT and computer information systems-related programs.

In the two years since the launch of NetApp’s industry-academic partnership program, students have logged thousands of online
training hours reinforcing the fundamental role that storage and data
management have in virtual shared infrastructures. Given the increasing demand
for storage-savvy college graduates, NetApp is providing students with an
entry-level industry credential that will document their expertise and give
them additional credibility when entering the job market.

Coinciding with the growing storage-related
IT needs among enterprises, greater demand will be placed on IT/CIS
professionals who can benefit from a practical data management curriculum. To
that end, NetApp recently initiated a range of academic collaborative
projects with schools and universities located domestically and abroad, from
Germany to Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Notably, NetApp engaged with
Wake Technical Community College, a two-year accredited technical training
school in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, to develop a new
storage-focused curriculum that will prepare students for entry-level customer
support roles.

"With
the increasing importance for IT workers to understand storage and data
management technologies, we wanted to extend our courses and coverage of these
topics," said Matthew D. Zullo, computer IT department head, Wake
Technical Community College. "Wake
Tech has been working with NetApp to develop several exciting new courses on
storage and virtualization that will leverage the Academic Alliances curriculum
materials and provide our students with broader IT skills and career
opportunities."

Internationally, NetApp is working with
Singapore Polytechnic, the first polytechnic established in Singapore, to integrate
a virtual NetApp Data ONTAP storage simulator (VSIM) into its Center for Cloud
Computing and Embedded Systems curriculum. This will provide Singapore
Polytechnic students with experience working with storage management tools.

"Our
goal in the Center is to develop a next generation of technologists who are
trained in the latest trends and technologies in cloud computing and data
center management," said Steven Chew, senior lecturer, technology
cluster leader for Cloud Computing & Embedded Systems, School of Electrical
and Electronic Engineering, Singapore Polytechnic. "Incorporating NetApp’s storage solutions and materials into our courses
gives our students exposure to the industry-leading storage management systems
that provide the foundation of today’s cloud and data center infrastructures."

While growing its academic partnerships,
NetApp has also continued to build on its long-standing technical collaboration
with industry leaders such as Teradata. NetApp recently joined the Teradata
University Network (TUN) as the newest technology partner to provide TUN’s
3,000 faculty members with teaching materials and resources on storage, HPC,
big data, and analytic solutions such as Hadoop. Capitalizing on the success of
the NetApp FlexPod solution, which delivers prevalidated architectures and
solutions for cloud infrastructures and data center consolidation, NetApp has
started expanding its curriculum offerings to include networking and
virtualization resources as well.

"With the growth of information, we believe
the future of computing will be data centric. To support this, IT communities
are going to require an experienced and skilled workforce that understands
storage and its important role in data infrastructure," said Regina
Kunkle, VP of State and Local Government and Education, NetApp Public Sector.
"We are building programs and
alliances within academia and industry to ensure students and graduates
entering the job market are fluent in the enabling technologies propelling
data-centric organizations."