As you may already know. EMC Released some new Specialist Certifications around a year ago, these were Cloud Architect (EMCCA) and Data Center Architect (EMCDCA). Jason Nash has a great post explaining this that can be found here.

I can confirm that today I sat the Cloud Architect Specialist Exam (Virtualised Infrastructure) and Passed

I want to talk a bit about my preparation for the Exam and why I decided I wanted this Certification.

So Why?
Some of you may have noticed that a few weeks ago I passed the EMCISA exam. This is required for the Cloud Architect Cert and I have actually been studying for this exam on and off for a few months. It was something I wanted to complete before joining starting my new job, however due to a busy handover period at my last place it kinda slipped. Anyway, I eventually got it out the way and as I had some previous experience in using Enterprise storage this was a good refresher for me on storage technologies.

I decided to do this as a stepping stone to get to the Cloud Architect Exam. My Previous Role was working for a Cloud Service Provider, so I felt that I had a good idea of business drivers, available technologies and cloud concepts. The certification hopefully would be a nice way to test myself on this.

Preperation
The main thing I did to prepare for this course was to attend the instructor Led training from EMC. I would recommend this to anybody who is looking to achieve the certification. It is not a very technical course, however it seemed it was designed to generate various debates and discussions within the class. I was fortunate to be on the course with some really experienced people from both EMC and External companies, so we had some great discussions around VDC and Cloud.

Another thing to mention is that this course is worth attending just for the course manual. It has all areas covered that will pop up in the Exam and was my main Prep resource after completing the course.

Finally I used the EMC online practice tests to prepare for the Exam and as usual these are a great reflection of the types of questions you will have to answer. Obviously these are not brain dumps of the actual Exam questions, so it is probably not worth digging really deep into the specific answer for the questions that you got wrong on the exam, but it is really good to see which modules you need to study more.

The Exam
For obvious reasons I cannot talk too much about the actual exam content, but I would just like to mention that the exam was a lot tougher than I expected after the course. Just make sure that you really study the course material, it may glaze over a technology product or feature on one slide or two, and it could so happen that 2 or 3 questions in your exam are based on that technology. So please do make sure that you cover all areas of the book. Unfortunately I can’t say no more except for Good luck to anybody who is taking the exam after reading this post .