Enterprise Grid Architect Certification Program by SMU

~

A few months back, I got arrowed to attend this interesting 4 day training to be a Grid Architect. Normally, I would have just accepted it as it’s a great break from work, but I thought I wasn’t even ready for it. Turns out that the course was a pilot run, where SMU is still trying to figure out how to structure the course. The attendees was an interesting mix, with 4 from Oracle R&D Allan, Lennard, Srini and Ram, then Marcus from NCS, Lionel from Ingram Micro, Hon-Chung from StanChart and myself from SCS, together with the lecturer Anindya Datta who rocks, Mok the super course administrator, Mohit with all the India vs Pakistan @ Kashmir stories and Alvin who can’t stop selling me Oracle 🙂

Anyway, this is just to say that the course is now official. You can get information about this course on SMU’s website:

Enterprise Grid Architect Certification Program

I’m not sure if Anindya and Mohit will still be teaching, but the course is one the shortest and most compact course to understand the status of today’s Grid technology and the application of Oracle Grid with lots of discussion about other stuff like Globus toolkit, the huge difference between the various definition of Grid (especially in Oracle speak, enterprise vs HPC speak and other major industry initiatives), and of course some hands on to convince you that Oracle is not all command line, but got nice GUI if you pay for the right licenses.

If you ask too much questions, you’ll go home feeling like you’ve just had 3 buffet meals in a day. But all is good otherwise, the notes are great (think they beefed it up more after all the feedback) but you won’t get to go deep into those case studies due to the shortness of the course. And like you know (if you’ve actually done any “system architecture” thing before), anything more complicated than just RACing up a bunch of Oracle DB to provide HA is pretty much a hunter gathering style architecture (yeah feel free to rebutt me…). Just be prepared to morph it slowly as the business demands grows.

Great work Mok 🙂 Hope you find many students for the course.

Finally, if you’re looking to talk more about application/services virtualization in general (i.e. what SAP Netweaver la, United Devices la, Microsoft Softgrid la, Appistry Fabrics la etc. etc. etc.) ring me up and buy me dinner. 😉