SNIA Education Trains 5,000 Professionals Worldwide in One Year.

SNW Fall 2006 Will Highlight the SNIA's Full-Suite of Educational Offerings

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced that it has trained more than 5,000 professionals - 50% more - worldwide in the last 12 months and will deliver a wide variety of additional training opportunities at the upcoming Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2006 Conference, October 31-November 3, 2006, in Orlando, FL. Since SNIA stated its mission to educate the industry, starting in 1999, the association has now trained more than 15,000 technology practitioners, certified more than 1,000 IT professionals and qualified more than 150 technology sales professionals.

"Our goal is to bring professional certification, training and development to the IT community on a world-wide basis through a variety of opportunities ranging from conference sessions, tutorials, interoperability demonstrations, Hands-On-Labs, workshops, publications and educational frameworks," said Ralph Luchs, director of education for the SNIA. "We are committed to continuing to expand and improve our stringent, high-quality educational opportunities through activities like the SNIA Storage Networking Certification Program (SNCP), SNIA Certifications and Hands-On-Labs, as well as events such as the recent Storage Developer's Conference."

Most recently, the SNIA completed the Second Annual Storage Developer's Conference in San Jose, CA, where the association conducted plugfests focused on CIFS and iSCSI and attendance more than doubled over the 2005 event. The SNIA will continue its conference and education momentum at the upcoming SNW Conference with offerings of tutorials, certifications and the Solutions Center demo area. The SNIA has also tripled the size of its Hands-On-Labs training offerings due to popular demand.

On a global basis, the SNIA continues to expand the breadth of companies participating in the SNCP, the storage industry's only vendor neutral storage networking certification program. Over the last twelve months, industry partnerships with the SNIA SNCP have increased by 50 percent. The current members, in the order they joined the SNCP are: Network Appliance, Finisar, McDATA, Hitachi Data Systems, Cisco and EMC.

The SNIA's educational programs, both in the U.S. and internationally, focus on all levels of storage networking expertise from core technology and development experts to networking IT professionals who have no previous storage background. For more information on SNIA Education and the wide variety of offerings, please visit www.snia.org/education.

About the SNIA

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit global organization, made up of more than 460 member companies and close to 7,000 active individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA members share the common goal of advancing the adoption of storage networks as complete and trusted solutions. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit the SNIA web site at http://www.snia.org.