Red Hat this week launched new courses and added a higher certification level to its suite of open source learning services.
“Red Hat has expanded its product base. Open source is extending further into the enterprise and skills are being spread relatively thinly as a result,” said Red Hat global learning services manager for the Asia Pacific, Jodie Kane.
Kane hopes the Red Hat Architect Certification (RHCA), designed for experienced Linux system administrators who already have the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification, will help fill the top-level skills gap.
“Red Hat is all about supporting enterprise to go open source and not be locked in to relying on certain vendors,” Kane said.
“Our training is focused on skills transfer. We teach the type of skills that can obviously not just be learnt on the job,” Kane said.
“Organizations do not want to trust their systems to an administrator who is still developing his or her skills. It is too much of a risk,” she added.
The architect certification was launched globally on Monday, and includes five courses. Two of these five courses are already available in Australia.
“The other three courses will be available in the US by July and we expect them to be here in Australia by September or October,” Kane said.
The new enterprise architect curriculum immerses participants in an equipment-intensive classroom to develop skills on data centre systems.
“The course enables each student to practice hands-on techniques using multiple servers plus storage arrays or SANs, all running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other open source technologies,” Kane said.
Vice president of Red Hat learning services, Peter Childers, said the architect courses would be attractive to companies interested in designing and managing open source architectures.
“The new courses develop top-level Linux expertise, for architects who design and manage multiple types of systems in complex infrastructures,” he said.
“A Red Hat Certified Architect has proven skills required to plan, design, deploy and manage application servers running operations, back end databases in the data centre, and corporate applications on the desktop.”
The five courses that make up the RHCA are:
- comprehensive network services training;
- software deployment and systems management for large organizations;
- training on directory services and authentication and security solutions critical for central management of servers and work stations;
- enterprise storage management and Global File Storage, which are new technologies from Red Hat;
- performance tuning and system monitoring.