{"id":1632,"date":"2011-05-24T12:48:17","date_gmt":"2011-05-24T19:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=1632"},"modified":"2011-05-25T13:05:37","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T20:05:37","slug":"netapp-certified-data-management-administrator-ncda-%e2%80%93-passed-ns0-154-data-ontap-8-0-7-mode-administrator-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=1632","title":{"rendered":"NetApp Certified Data Management Administrator (NCDA) \u2013 Passed NS0-154 Data ONTAP 8.0 7-Mode Administrator Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

I passed the new style (single exam) NS0-154\u00a0 NetApp Certified Data Management Administrator (NCDA)<\/a> test today.\u00a0 I had the good fortune to take some instructor led courses for this from Fastlane – Data ONTAP 8.0 7-Mode Administration (DOT87M)<\/a> and Accelerated NCDA Boot Camp Data ONTAP 8.0 7-Mode (ANCDABC87)<\/a>.\u00a0 They were good preparation.\u00a0 The exam was 75 questions, 90 minutes.\u00a0 I passed it with a 99% (missed one) and it took me maybe 20 minutes.<\/p>\n

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These NetApp tests are “low volume” – that means that there’s not enough people taking them to justify publishers to write prep books, or test prep publishers to make practice exams.\u00a0 Therefore there is little official test preparation material available short of instructor led training.\u00a0 I was fortunate to get ILT, but each of my one week classes cost something like $5000, pretty pricey for those on a budget.<\/p>\n

NetApp has a pretty good downloadable study guide named NCDA Bootcamp Training Review<\/a> (free NetApp on the Web (NOW) account required).\u00a0 They also have a semi-cheesy practice test for NS0-154<\/a> that’s like 20 questions, and always the *SAME* 20 questions.\u00a0 It’s better than nothing.<\/p>\n

An important note is that NetApp recently changed the way they tested NCDA.\u00a0 There originally were 2 tests – NS0-153 “Storage Networking Professional” and NS0-163 “Data Protection Solutions Professional”.\u00a0 You had to take both exams to get NCDA.\u00a0 These exams covered the (old, deprecated) Data ONTAP 7.X.<\/p>\n

When Data ONTAP 8.0 7-Mode<\/a> came out, NetApp decided to consolidate both of the topics on the former exams into one new exam, the NS0-154 “Data ONTAP 8.0 7-Mode Administrator”.\u00a0 So although the new single exam is for 8.0, and has some new features on it, in general, they\u00a0 just consolidated the questions from NS0-153 and NS0-163.\u00a0 So any test prep materials you can find for those 2 exams will be helpful.\u00a0 NetApp also has semi-cheesy 20 question practice exams for NS0-153<\/a> and NS0-163<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So what did I do?<\/p>\n