The best performing professionals in the IT industry are passionate about learning. Technology is changing rapidly and it is difficult to keep up with the pace of that change. Also, the rapid changes in environment necessitate change in people. Continuous education is imperative to bring the necessary change.  Top performers understand the need for consistent learning and this is what enables them to have a successful career in IT industry.

Satya Nadella, in his first email to employees after becoming the CEO at Microsoft, wrote,“Many who know me say I am also defined by my curiosity and thirst for learning. I buy more books than I can finish. I sign up for more online courses than I can complete. I fundamentally believe that if you are not learning new things, you stop doing great and useful things. So family, curiosity and hunger for knowledge all define me.” This powerful statement summarizes the usefulness of acquiring new skills and certifications.

ITIL certification is one such certification.  IT professionals who want to advance their career must pursue ITIL certification.  Being ITIL certified results inhigher salaries and career advancement.   In this article we will take you through various aspects of ITIL certifications to help you better understand the opportunities that lie ahead once you get ITIL certified.

What is ITIL?

A few decades ago, Information Technology was complex and expensive and only skilled professionals understood it. People with great technical expertise used to be part of IT departments and they were the ones who consulted businesses on the IT system and components. Unfortunately, very few of them had a sound understanding of what businesses really needed. This wasn’t the only problem. Large IT organizations were merely managing technology rather than providing services.

The development of the ITIL framework led to the standardization of IT processes. This was the time when IT companies shifted their focus on providing services to their customers rather than just managing technology. ITIL laid a strong emphasis on standardization of processes which helped IT companies in two ways:

1. Improving the quality of services
2. Reducing the cost of service delivery

It also reduced the dependencies of the advice of the IT professionals in the business and commercial matters and it bridged the gap between technology and business considerably. IT companies became more efficient and effective whenever they adopted ITIL processes. For example

• Implementing incident management helped in resolving incidents quickly at low costs (they needed fewer resources to resolve incidents)
• Introducing capacity management that meant that the IT infrastructure was less expensive and more responsive to business demand

A brief History of ITIL

Before explaining details of ITIL certifications, let us have a look at a brief history of ITIL:

ITIL Certifications Overview and Credit System

ITIL credit system follows a modular system where you receive credits on completion of each module. The credits earned become qualifying criteria for next module.

ITIL Foundation – ITIL foundation deals with key concepts, elements and terminology of ITIL services lifecycle management. The first level of ITIL certification with 40 multiple choice question. There is no prerequisite to undertake this certification. It awards 2 credits to successful candidates. No prerequisites are required to take this examination.

ITIL Practitioner – ITIL Practitioner comes after Foundation and is designed to help people implement what they learned in Foundation.  ITIL Practitioner training classes are full on workshops that help students implement what they learned in Foundation. It awards 3 credits to successful candidates however it is not a prerequisite to take ITIL Intermediate or other advance level exams.

ITIL Intermediate – The eligibility criteriafor ITILintermediate level requires candidates to have passed ITIL Foundation and complete an accredited training course.Candidates are awarded 15 or 16 credits upon successful completion of ITIL Intermediate exams. There are two elements in intermediate level, Service Lifecycle examinations and Service Capability examinations.

Service Lifecycle examinations includes

• Service Strategy
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operations
• Continual Service Improvement

Service capability examinations include

• Planning Protection & Optimization
• Release Control & Validation
• Operational Support & Analysis and
• Service Offerings and Agreements

ITIL Managing Across the Lifecycle – You must pass ITIL Foundation and ITIL intermediate level exam and earn a total of 17 credits to be eligible for ITIL Managing Across the Lifecycle (MALC) exam. You will earn5 credits on successful completion of MALC exam.

ITIL Expert Level – You should have earned 22 credits from ITIL Foundation exam, ITIL intermediate level exam and MALC exam to be eligible for ITIL expert level exam.

ITIL Master Qualification – You must be ITIL expert level qualified to appear for ITIL master qualification. To achieve this qualification, you must “explain and justify how you selected and individually applied a range of knowledge, principles, methods and techniques from ITIL and supporting management techniques, to achieve desired business outcomes in one or more practical assignments. (Source: www.exin.com)”

Benefits of ITIL certifications for Individuals

ITIL certifications will definitely boost your career and salary prospects. According to various surveys, ITIL certification is one of the top 20 most sought after certifications (in IT industry) in the world. According to an “Indeed” survey, professionals with ITIL certifications earn 38% higher salary as compared to their non-certified peers. Here is a trend of salaries of ITIL certified individuals over past few years:

(Source: Indeed.com)

Job Titles For ITIL Professionals

The job titles or designations entirely depend on level of ITIL certifications as well as years of experience in IT industry. After completing ITIL Foundation exam successfully you may enter industry as a Business Analyst or Solution Engineer. At middle and senior level you may become Change Management Manager, Service Delivery Manager, Program Manager – IT, Director – Information Technology, etc.

Advantages of ITIL implementation for Organizations

Most of the major IT companies have implemented ITIL. An ITIL implementation report from Gartner says, “clients have identified improved customer satisfaction with IT services, better communications and information flows between IT staff and customers, and reduced costs in developing procedures and practices within an enterprise”. According to a Forrester survey, more than 80% of businesses thought that “ITIL had improved their organizational productivity and service quality significantly”.

If implemented correctly, organizations can derive the following benefits in the medium to long term

• Improved quality of the services
• Reduction in cost of delivery IT services
• Creating values for their customers and meeting business requirements
• Achieving excellence in whatever they do – Continuously improving the processes
• Improved coordination with clients and partners
• Easy to scale the business
• Focus on SLAs (Service Level Agreements)

Cost of ITIL Certification

Here is a list of pricing for EXIN ITIL Exam cost and passing criteria

You can save some bucks on your ITIL examination fee. Contact us on customerservice@gogotraining.com and we will arrange a coupon code for you.

Cost of ITIL Training Program

The cost of ITIL certification courses differs from institute to institute. It depends on the experience of the instructors, their competencies and track record. While selecting a training institute, you mustn’t focus entirely on the cost. It is necessary that you strike the right balance between the cost and other above mentioned factors. GogoTraining offers an excellent combination when it comes to cost and the experiences and skills of the trainers.

You can check out the cost of training program here: https://gogotraining.com/training/libraries/17/itil/

If you want to know more details or have any queries, just send an email at customerservice@gogotraining.com for current discount and offers on ITIL training programs.

Advantages of our Online ITIL Training Courses

• Instructor Led Training Program
• Experienced Instructors with 20+ years industry experience
• Access to Instructors for support and queries
• Self-paced learning – You can learn at any time as per your convenience
• Cost effective as compared to classroom programs.

You can take advantage of these benefits and much more from the online courses at GogoTraining. We ensure that our students get the necessary support and incubation that will allow them to not just complete the certification courses in a convenient manner but groom them as efficient ITIL professionals with the required competencies and skills.

How to choose right training provider for ITIL Certification?

The first thing is to ensure that you enroll only to an Accredited Training Service Provider and Examination Institute.

There are a number of Accredited Training Organizations (ATOs)those that have been fully accredited by an approved Examination Institute and provide ITIL certification courses, both online and in person.

• Check their track record
• Instructor’s experience
• Course Details
• Pass Percentage

GogoTraining is an Accredited ITIL Training Organization. Accredited by Axelos and EXIN in ITIL Foundation through MALC and will be releasing the ITIL Practitioner course Summer 2016.  Course authors have been working in teaching in the field for over 20 years and are considered top in their field.  GogoTraining has the necessary accreditation and we have helped numerous ITIL aspirants to realize their potential of becoming successful ITIL professionals.

Still have a query? We are here to help.  If you want to know more details,  have any questions, or would like to find out about current discount offers on ITIL Training Programs contact customerservice@gogotraining.com.

Introduction

Software is everywhere. A lot of it works well all day long. Some of it is terrible. Some of it can kill you.

This article is about critical software, the stuff that really needs to work, and that can have significant consequences if it doesn’t.

There are three trends I have noticed in software organizations:

1. The desire to get software into more critical systems (e.g., medical, automotive, transportation, finance and aviation).
2. Software organizations are either serious about quality or hopeful. There isn’t much in between.
3. For the latter, there is only a vague consideration that current engineering practices should improve when risk increases. It is almost assumed that if software is called “critical,” then it will work, and if it doesn’t, a few more weeks of testing will fix it.

The “just test more” approach works fine until someone is hurt, a contract is lost, or there is serious legal action.

Doing it

Writing software is hard, and writing critical software is harder because there are numerous scenarios that the software has to react to. The increase in risk should cause an increase in better development practices to mitigate the new risk.

The typical (and not so great) approach to improve quality is to:

• Test more and longer.
• Assume that if the system passes the tests then it must work.
• Downplay upfront practices such as requirements, design, good coding practices and peer reviews since they are not coding.

The trouble with the “test more and longer” approach is that if some of the upfront practices were not done, then testing is just a poke in the dark. That is, the testers have no clear picture of what conditions to test for, or when they should be done.

But the tests pass, so it must be OK?

It is wonderful that the (limited) test cases passed (in the limited schedule-crunched time you had for testing). However, let us dig deeper:

• Do the test cases cover all of the likely functions, system scenarios and user scenarios?
• Do the test cases cover every line of code so that you know for sure that some untested conditional loop doesn’t cause a system failure.
• Did anyone look at the code to see that, although it passed the (limited) test cases, the call to “calculate-stuff(input)” will crash the system if the input is zero (when the year is an even number).
• Is the code a huge spaghetti mess that no one actually understands what it does? If a large plate of critical spaghetti code doesn’t make you or your management nervous, you might be dead!

A slightly different approach

In a previous blog I listed some standard quality activities for any type of organization that can be applied selectively to high-risk areas. Those were:

• Peer reviews of requirements, design information and interfaces
• Peer reviews of code and interface definitions
• Peer reviews of test cases and test procedures
• Prototypes and simulation
• Component testing
• Code coverage checks to determine the code has been tested
• Process audits to maintain the adoption of the organization’s best practices
• Integration testing
• Analysis of defect statistics to determine product state and areas for further investigation
• System and acceptance testing using the intended environment, user-oriented requirements and exception conditions

Here are some additional ones if you are in the “This-critical-system-really-must-work” business.

• Definition of requirement quality attributes to define hard quality expectations (e.g., reliability, performance, accuracy, fault tolerance).
• Tracing requirements to test cases to know for sure that the system actually does what it is defined to do.
• Peer review and test of new code, reused code, and “cool code we found on the internet.” Do you really know what you have? If no one has looked, then you don’t know.
• Design for reliability to add characteristics ensuring that defined run periods are met (e.g., a fail-safe recovery vs. a blue screen after 1,000 hours).
• Test coverage analysis to know what has been tested.
• Defect density analysis to understand quality trends and hot spots.
• Hazard and risk analysis of critical functions.

For software organizations that have no design, few requirements, no peer reviews, no traceability and no code coverage analysis, all bets are off.

What you can do

Writing reliable critical code is not easy, and applying the quality practices listed above can be overwhelming. To start, identify between 5 percent and 20 percent of the system to investigate. Here are some example criteria to identify initial system areas to focus on:

• The most critical to the program’s operation
• The most used (and therefore visible) section in the product
• The most costly if defects were to exist
• The most error-prone section based on current defect data
• The least well-known section
• The most frequently changed (and therefore high-risk) section

Not moved yet? Keep reading

Here are two short articles that provide some examples to ponder:

• Appendix F of http://www.system-safety.org/Documents/Software_System_Safety_Handbook.pdf
• http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-“spaghetti”-code

This article by Neil Potter is on Developing Critical Systems.

Planning to get Oracle® certified? Well done! You have made the right decision – it will make you stand out in the highly competitive market. Apart from getting broader access to the industry’s most challenging opportunities, certifications provided by Oracle® Corporation demonstrates your knowledge and skills required to support core products available in Oracle®. With the increasing competition, employers are practicing the cherry picking policy where they are selecting the best cherry from the lot.

When you become a Certified Professional recognized by Oracle®, you demonstrate understanding of the skills that are required by professionals to get fit in the chosen role. IT professionals who are accredited with OCA have a competitive and distinct advantage over other IT aspirants.

With each and every step that you make towards gaining knowledge and a set of skills, you are entitled to a certification that:

• Accelerates your professional development
• Improvises your level of productivity
• Enhances your credibility

In addition, certification enables the companies to hire proven performers that justify the company’s investment in the Oracle® technology. Scenario-based tests included in certification of Oracle® give an effective assessment analysis of problem-solving ability and hands-on expertise. The certification will enable the employers to recognize your skills, knowledge to install & configure, and maintain the database; thereby, adding value to your career growth.

Oracle offers different certification tracks including Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) and Oracle Certified Associate (OCA). Each of these certifications hold a distinct advantage, highlights your achievements and identifies you as a valuable asset to the company. Survey reviews and statistical analysis conducted by WordPress and Payscale for professionals certified by Oracle® shows that:

• 82% of OCP’s realized a major acceleration in their earning capability.
• 42% of OCP’s elaborated that if their employer would pay for their accreditation, they would get it.
• 90% of OCP’s agreed that they have been able to improve their job prospects.
• 89% of OCP’s gave a consent that they consider themselves better qualified in managing and tend to stay with that company executing complex issues and projects.

Below are some of the major benefits credited with the OCA DBA 11g/12c certification provided by Oracle®:

• Proven skills and expertise of an IT Professional
• Ability to handle massive and continually expanding necessities of modern organizations
• Complete knowledge of database backup & recovery, creating & maintaining data and preparing the database environment

Data Center Cooling is the practice of maintaining ideal operating temperature at the data center facility by using collective equipments, tools, techniques and processes. Temperature alarms are set at Data Center facilities which can alert the concerned people about abrupt rise in temperature. For proper functioning of the data center facility, certain practices are recommended for cooling maintenance and dealing with changes in temperature.

Data Center Cooling System

The system for Data Center Cooling basically consists of three components namely Infrastructure such as air conditioners, air ducts, cooling towers etc, Cooling Management Software and temperature monitoring equipments and processes.

Best Practices

Detection

Detect the IT load in Kilowatts and measure the intake temperature across the center. Detect the hot spots which show a considerable temperature increase. After detection, measure the airflow volume for each cooling unit and record the supply and return temperatures for each unit for determining the sensible cooling load.

Comparison

Compare the cooling load with the IT load detected in the previous step. By using the airflow return and air temperature measured, determine the sensible capacity of each unit in Kilowatts. Determine the maximum allowable intake temperature for the operating environment after the through comparison.

Actions to be taken

Cable management

Seal the vertical fronts, cable holes and air leakage to manage airflow in the operating center. Also ensure that the cable holes in the raised floors are sealed so that airflow leakage is minimized.

Aisle Management

Hot and cold aisle management is to be ensured to manage airflow. Relocate all perforated floor tiles to the cold aisle. Also ensure the alignment in the placement of ceiling return grilles with the hot aisles.

Reduce number of cooling units

Estimate the number of required cooling units. This can be done by dividing the IT load with the smallest sensible cooling unit capacity. After estimation, reduce the number of cooling units by turning off the not required ones. The cooling units with the lowest sensible load should be identified and turned off.

This process is done to ensure that cooling standards are maintained along with optimum power efficiency.

Maintain the desired temperature

The best practice is to keep the temperature in the data center regulated so that too high or low temperatures don’t prevail. By comparing and monitoring the temperature, the desired level temperature can be ensured. Also temperature alarms prove to be a very useful tool in alerting and ensuring temperature maintenance.

Energy efficiency is the basic requirement to ensure optimum functionality of a Data Center. Certain practices to monitor energy consumption and avoiding energy wastage are the secrets of running a successful data center facility. The top ten have been discussed as follows.

• Supplemental Load Reduction

The secondary load contributors in a data center are supplemental load resources. The supplemental load can be reduced by following methods like reducing the energy use of equipments and upgrading the building’s roofing and insulation.

• Lighting

Maintain the lighting to the level required in the center. Upgrade the center’s system with energy efficient light sources which consume less power.

• Industrial Refrigeration

The industrial refrigeration system if used in data centers can be beneficial as it won’t allow the systems to overheat. Along with ensuring data safety, this system reduces energy and operation costs.

• Restructure the Air Distribution System

It has been found that oversized fans consume a least 10 percent more power. The center’s air distribution system should be equipped the right sized fans that consume lesser power.

• Supply Air Control

The supply air control system requires additional supply air temperature sensors as the air conditioners don’t come equipped with these. This system thus regulates and monitors the temperature of the air being supplied. This implementation is much faster and efficient than other traditional systems. 

• Variable Speed Fan Drives

Power consumption by a fan is high and is a function of a cube of the fan’s speed. Retrofitting any constant speed cooling fan to variable speeds or by replacing legacy units with new units with built in variable speed capability can reduce power consumption and increase efficiency.

• Retro Commissioning

Commissioning ensures that computer systems are designed, installed and their functionalities and capabilities are tested in accordance to the data center’s operational needs. Retro commissioning is a similar process of system reviewing alignment and optimization but this process takes place at a later point of the center’s life cycle. It ensures recalibrating the systems to perform more efficiently, thus saving power.

• Heating and Cooling Equipment Upgrades

Certain heating and cooling systems consume more power than required. It is always wise to choose the right kind of equipments which are not oversized, are energy efficient and do not consume more power than required.

• Increase Chilled Water Temperature

One of the largest power consumers in a data center is a chilled water system. Increasing the temperature of the chilled water system by raising the air handler temperature set point can help to reduce energy consumption.

• Pumping Systems

Pumping actions like replacing throttling valves with speed controls, reducing speed for fixed load, installing a parallel system for high variable loads and replacing motor or a pump with a more efficient model all come with energy savings from 10 to 60 percent.

IT Asset Management and Its Role

The IT department forms a major division of an enterprise. IT Asset management plays a crucial strategic role in the profitable functioning of the IT department. Hardware and software form the main two components of this department. Managing hardware and software inventory, their purchases and redistribution is handled by this set of business practices. The two forms of IT Asset Management are below.

Hardware Asset Management

This section deals with managing the physical components of computer devices in the industry, starting from their purchase to disposal. This includes determining the life cycle of hardware components and their disposability, and hence, estimating the requirement of new devices. Industrial processes like approval of purchasing of new hardware, procuring process and life cycle management all comes under this section.

Software Asset Management

In a similar manner, procuring and discarding software like programming language versions, anti-virus versions and licenses are handled under this section. Software asset management is a more frequent process than the previous one, as software upgrades need to be met on a regular basis in the industry.

Role of IT Asset Management

• Life cycle Management

Life cycle Management deals with determining the life cycle of hardware and software components and when the old ones should be disposed off and new components to be purchased. This is a complex process done with the integration with the management and procurement divisions of the organization. Responsibilities include development of policies and measurements regarding the life cycle of both hardware and software components.

• Risk Management

This division comes under Life cycle management and involves managing system issues, purchase costs, compliance and business policies. It mainly aims at minimizing risk so that the cost-effectiveness regarding purchases and disposal of hardware and software is maintained.

• Integrated Software Solutions

In order to integrate itself with the other departments of the organization, the IT Asset Management division has deployed the system of Integrated Software Solutions in order to work with all related departments for functions related to IT assets like procurement, deployment and expense reporting.

• Software protection

Regarding the protection of software versions in the organization, this department focuses upon organization’s software up gradation with the latest anti-virus protection to detect malware and viruses. Thus, it helps to preserve the software assets of the organization, hence ensuring that the software functionality standards are maintained.

Overview of Python

Python, a programming language that was developed in the late 1980s, is named after its developer, Monty Python. One of the advantages of using Python is that a program can be written using fewer code lines, as compared to other programming languages, such as C++ or Java. In addition to this, other advantages that Python provides is it is freely available, is open-source software, can be used on different Operating Systems, is Object-Oriented, and has automatic Memory Management.

Overview of Data Structures

Each program has some variable values that need to be stored during the execution of a program. Data structures can be defined as containers that are used to store these variable values having same methods for manipulating the available data.  Some of the reasons to use data structures are:

• Efficient problem-solving
• Focus on main problems without getting into detail
• Consistent way
• Information is securely stored
• Sorted data

Types of Data Structures

Different types of available Python Data Structures are:

• Strings: Most commonly used data structure that is written using either single or double quotes. Further, using the built-in strings, many operations can be easily performed. You can also index and extract program slices by using the subscript notation.
• Lists: The most systematized, generalized, and schematic data structures. Using a list, various different types of Python objects, such as numbers, functions, strings, can be stored in a sequenced manner. Some of the common list data types are:
  • list.append: Adds item to end of the list
  • list.insert: Inserts an item in the list
  • list.remove: Removes an item from the list
  • list.extend: Extends the list by appending it
  • list.sort: Sorts the list according to the requirement
  • list.count: Returns the number a particular type appears
• Dictionaries: These are one of the important data types that are been used in Python. Data in a Dictionary values are entered in the key-value pair enclosed within the {} braces. Dictionaries are used in cases of a logical association, fast data lookup, or when constant data modification takes place.
• Sets: These are the data structures that are used for storing an unordered collection having no duplicate values. Primary function of creating sets is to perform membership testing and eliminating duplicate values.
• Tuples: These are the data structures that are defined as immutable lists in which data values are separated by commas. Immutable represents that you cannot delete/ edit/ add the tuple value.

Multithreaded programs can be developed using the Java Programming language.  By a multithread program, it means a program comprises of two or more actions, where each action performs different tasks simultaneously. Multithreading can also be said as a synonym for multitasking where each thread corresponds to each task. The benefits of multithreaded program are that multiple activities run parallel and use the same program.

What is a Thread?

A thread in a Java program in its simplest definition is a sequential flow of statements that defines an execution path for a program.  A Java program should contain at least one thread that is the main thread, which is invoked by the main () method.

Ways to Create a Java Thread

The Thread class is one of the main classes in Java that is written as java.lang.Thread class. This class, along with the Runnable interface, is used to create threads in Java. A thread in Java can be created in either of the two following ways:

• Extending the java.lang.Thread class

Or

• Implementing the java.lang.Runnable Interface

Life Cycle of a Java Thread

A thread in a Java program goes through different states, as shown in the following flowchart:

A brief description of these states is as follows:

• New:  Refers to the state after an instance of the Thread class gets created but before the invocation of the start () method. This state marks the beginning of life cycle of a thread.
• Runnable: Refers to the state where a thread executes the task for which it is created. The thread comes into this state after the start() method is invoked.
• Running: Refers to the state where thread is selected by the scheduler for the execution purpose.
• Not-Runnable (Blocked): Refers to the state where thread is alive; however it is not eligible to run.
• Terminated: Refers to the state when a thread gets terminate and is in a dead state.

Familiarizing with Thread Priorities

We are aware of the availability of multiple Java threads in a program. But the question that arises is how a program knows which thread to run first or sequence of execution order for all threads. The solution to this can be given by scheduling thread execution. Each thread in a Java program has a priority. By default, priority of a thread is inherited by its parent thread and is in between numbers 1 to 10, where number 1 denotes that thread is at the minimum priority level and 10 denotes the highest priority level for a thread. Further, thread priority can also be changed according to the requirement using the java.lang.Thread.setPriority () method.