The primary goal of the vCommunity Trust is to help students and community members around the world that are eager to gain experience with infrastructure technologies including virtualization, compute, networking and storage by providing access to hands-on labs and affordable training materials.
The vCommunity Trust Inc. (vTrust) was initially formed to fulfill these needs as a Minnesota nonprofit on Sept. 23, 2010. The founders, Paul Valentino and Tim Oudin, formulated the initial plan to start the vTrust at The Chieftain Irish Pub in San Fransisco, CA on Sunday evening just prior to day one of the 2010 VMworld conference.
By August 4, 2011 the vTrust rounded out the board of directors by recruiting Chris Cicotte – Secretary, Caroline Orloff – Treasurer, Matt Leib – Director of Communications, and Luigi Danakos – Director of Marketing; we also obtained public charity 501(c)(3) determination from the IRS, and achieved partner in trust status with GuideStar. Now we’re well on our way to a fully functional lab environment thanks to contributions from the community, EMC, and ipHouse. We’ve also received donations of software and exam vouchers from TrainSignal and VMware to help candidates obtain VMware VCP certification.
The vTrust has maintained 0% administrative costs and overhead which has been possible through Google Apps for Nonprofits and contributions from vCommunity Trust volunteers.
We currently use datacenter hosting from ipHouse, and the compute and virtualization server resources required for a lab which will support approximately 25 students concurrently; however, we still are lacking the storage and networking components required to complete the initial build.
The vTrust lab environment will be used to provide hands-on access for students and community members, and it will also provide the resources to develop essential training materials and valuable lab guides that can be found at http://www.vcommunitytrust.org/vprofessional-materials.
There are many ways individuals and businesses may contribute to this cause and we greatly appreciate your support. We honor gifts by including the donors name or logo within our training materials and on our website so that our students and visitors to the site will know who has made an investment in the global community.
We welcome cash donations by mail or through our site at http://www.vcommunitytrust.org/donations, and you can mail your equipment donations to 30883 Montclair Dr, Lindstrom, MN 55045. You can also transfer the rights of technical training materials created by you or your company to vCommunity Trust Inc.
To show your support of the vTrust, you can put a web banner on your blog or web site. You can download the banners from our vTrust Facebook page or we can email it to you if you send your request to [email protected].
No matter how much you contribute, all gifts will have a significant impact for increasing interest, awareness and knowledge of new technologies and enabling individuals from all walks of life to embark on a successful career in technology. The ability to have hands-on experience with advanced technologies we feel is the best way to prepare individuals for the workplace.
We thank you for partnering with us and our students to make this a reality.
About the author
Current vCommunity Trust Chairman of the Board and ECMC Enterprise Infrastructure Architect, Paul Valentino has more that fifteen years of experience in the IT industry. Paul was considered one of the greatest security risks at Xerographics Inc. while working in the Accounts Receivable department because he was in the habit of automating processes using technology without requesting the assistance of IT; therefore, a change in career path was in order.
Over the next few years he transitioned into a systems engineering consulting role providing support, maintenance and system build services to local manufacturing and banking institutions throughout Connecticut. In the late 90s he became the IT Manager of a New York start-up venture specializing in distributed systems. Eventually he started SYSXPERTS, LLC, a technical solutions consultancy, which serviced many small to mid sized businesses in the New England region in the early 2000s before moving to Minnesota in 2006. Paul's primary professional goal is to attain and share as much technical information as he possibly can with hopes that others will discover they are equally passionate about technology.
