As chairman, Heers will head the Board for the next twelve months, aided by Vice Chairman Andrew Manners, who currently serves as HP's Network Storage Solutions director. Other office bearers include Secretary Andrew Antal from Computer Associates and Treasurer Peter Glover of Imation. They were elected at the group's first annual general meeting last Friday.
"Our success, and that of the storage industry, depends on this establishment of best practices, industry standards and education programs that span all vendors' products," Heers said in a statement.
One of the key benefits of SNIA's local presence is access to globally-recognised qualifications in storage networking systems.
For instance, the Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (FC-SAN) Certification Program, awarded by SNIA, comprises four levels -- professional, practitioner, specialist and expert. This certification has been designed to assess skills and knowledge specifically in fibre channel-SAN technologies.
FC-SAN certification is the first track in the SNIA Storage Networking Certification Program (SNCP)--a vendor-independent course that provides a standard to gauge an IT professional's overall storage networking proficiency.
In Asia-Pacific, there are plans afoot to introduce Level 3 specialist certification by year-end, with education programs handled by Melbourne-based training firm Infinity I/O Asia-Pacific.
SNIA ANZ members include Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Acer, Markom Marketing, Iomega, Sun Microsystems, Network Appliance, Hitachi Data Systems, Computer Associates, Imation, EMC, Veritas Software, Quantum SSG, Hewlett-Packard, Infinity I/O, IBM and Brocade Communications.
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