HDS Academy - Thoughts on "Combo" Courses

I had the privilege of being the instructor for an interesting HDS Academy (EMEA) experiment over the last few weeks.  The company picked up a big order from a customer that included some extensive training requirements.  Customer (based in UK) is primarily user of enterprise-level storage arrays, but also purchases modular arrays, for use both in standalone environments and as external storage (UVM).One of the challenges when offering training to a large enterprise is balancing the need to impart a lot of information with the fact that most companies are loathe to let their storage admins go for more than a few days of training.  Still, if you want to improve their skills, you have to let us teach them.  The European Education Center came up with a pretty good compromise: teach both Enterprise and Modular Foundations (THI0517 and THI0515) over a single, 5-day week.When you look at both of the Foundations classes side-by-side, there's a lot of overlap in the course content.  After all, the server-based products of the Management Suite work the same whether you're an Enterprise or Modular customer, so there's no need to repeat instruction on Device Manager, Tuning Manager, Tiered Storage Manager, HDLM/HGLM, etc.  We started with the Enterprise course first, since that fit the customer's environment better.  So, Monday through Thursday morning ran basically the same as any THI0517 class.  We usually wrap up the 4-day class around lunch time on the last day, and these classes were no exception. After lunch on Thursday, we got started on AMS-specific content, product overview, hardware, then the modules on management software.  This particular customer has a mix of 1000- and 2000-series AMS arrays, so the lectures took the usual crossover tone I've been using since the beginning of the year.  We wrapped up the AMS content by Friday evening, still moving at a pace that kept everyone in a solid comfort zone.We were able to validate this instruction plan the following week, teaching a second group of people from the same company, but the real test came on the third week.  Because the UK had a "bank holiday" on that Monday, we were unable to do full 5-day week of instruction.  The EEC set up a combo class in the HDS office in Oslo, Norway, whose students consisted of a mix of customers and engineers from channel partner companies.  In particular, channel partners always complain when they have to send their people off for weeks of training, so this group was receptive to the combo concept.The Oslo class kept up with the pace I set just fine.  When introducing the combo concept and the strategy, it helped to be able to say the format had been successful in Altrincham, UK, for the previous two weeks.  Overall, the combo of the two Foundations classes is a great strategy, particularly in single-customer training environments.  It gives the storage teams a solid overview of both product lines, and frees up time for them to take additional courses that have hands-on lab exercises.