"Are You Intelligent?" is a bit of an awkward question to ask a college student interviewing for a job.
"Are You Intelligent?" would be a valid question to ask a storage system.
"Are You Intelligent about Intelligent Storage Systems?" would be an excellent question to ask a college student looking for a job in the storage industry. If the answer is "Yes", there is a natural follow-up:
Prove it.
This week I had the chance to visit the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. It's been nearly two years since EMC and the JFK Library announced a joint effort to digitally preserve massive amounts of JFK's legacy.
The storage being used at the JFK Library includes CLARiiON and Centera (two products I've helped develop). I wanted to understand how these two products have been combined with other EMC products to form a digital preservation infrastructure.
I also wanted to meet the team that was performing this digital conversion, and try to understand their process and how it mapped on top of this infrastructure.
In other words, my purpose was to understand the process and the infrastructure for a very ambitious digital preservation effort.
I was not disappointed.
Everybody has ideas at work. It may be a process idea. If may be an organizational idea. For me, it tends to be a product idea.
It's been my experience that pushing ideas toward product takes persistence. It's not easy. For me it's been a process of influencing at a local level (within my group) and slowly expanding the sphere of buy-in until the idea reaches the attention of a decision maker.
At EMC in 2007 the culture of idea incubation and growth fundamentally changed. It got easier (but not necessarily easy!). This new culture of innovation will be highlighted at EMC World 2008 in Las Vegas. I'll be describing the idea that I helped propose at last year's Innovation Conference. EMC put together an "idea channel" that allows employees to put an idea into an innovation pipeline.
What happens before ideas go into the pipeline?
I like to call that the idea behind the idea.
Happy Cinco De Mayo. I have to admit that until recently I was unaware of this Mexican holiday and the history behind it. My first introduction to Cinco De Mayo was probably a Corona beer commercial. Anyway the 5th of May has got me thinking about the very first "code name" for the product that would eventually become CLARiiON.
The Corona Project.
Launched in 1987 at the Data General facility in Durham, NH, the Corona Project faced one of its biggest obstacles in early 1990 when the powers-that-be at DG's Westborough headquarters started asking themselves a question that had become a DG semi-annual tradition:
Should we lay these guys off?
It seems to me that I'm a little late to the party when it comes to blogging about EMC World 2008. Many of my blogging co-workers have already signed up for a blogging get-together.
I've been invited to speak at the conference, so I'm going. I'm a little anxious about it for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, I'm coordinating the last-minute details of a demo that our research team in China is putting together (more on this below). That's always a little stressful, but hey, it's not like I'm the only engineer at EMC trying to pull something together.
You know what the real problem is?
Mark Twomey's public speculation about my wardrobe!
Last week was school vacation week in Massachusetts. Most of the public schools give kids the week off, and many EMC employees in the NorthEast took the week off as well. I was out all week.
It was an incredible stretch of weather. I have solar panels on my house and they cranked out about 60kw hours of power last week. There were few clouds to be seen.
Now it's Monday, it's raining, and I'm back at work, practicing post-vacation behavioral advice that I give to everyone:
Bite Your Tongue.
You never know where inspiration might strike.
Before the release of the first CLARiiON, the VP of Engineering held an impromptu data integrity meeting. We had put a lot of effort into rock-solid data integrity for our implementation of RAID5, but we had one sticky problem that we couldn't figure out. So we sat around for an hour scratching our heads and came up with nothing. Meeting over.
I started my ten minute drive home. My boss started his 90 minute drive home.
About halfway home he nearly drove off the road due to divine software inspiration.
I didn't get a "storage" education when I was in college. I had to learn on the job.
At work I learned about spindles, cylinders, tracks, seek times, head bumps, rotational latency, and transfer rates. These things represented critical knowledge to help me do my job as a software engineer building storage products.
What's the critical knowledge that you need to help do your job in 2008? What topics should you be learning about at your university?
You gotta start with the fundamentals.
I'm returning to the Information Playground theme. There's been a flurry of acquisitions made recently by EMC. This equates to increasing the size of the geodesic dome that myself and others get to play on. When you add companies to the EMC portfolio, it results in an increasingly growing set of software monkeys swinging from bar to bar. Smart fun.
Iomega. Pi. Infra. WysDM. Document Sciences.
Are we still in 2008?
Each new company results in the churning of brain gears and what I like to call "acquisition permutation combinations". It's a fun game. But it's time for me to face the facts. The permutation combinatorials have exceeded my neuron firing capacity. I've seen it before, and there's an elegant solution.
Build an Expert System.
The XAM announcement today is a major deal for Centera. It caused me to think about conversations that were occuring outside my cubicle three years ago. I sat near the GM and CTO of Centera. Was I eavesdropping? (Hey, the door was open!). This is what I heard:
"Some customers are hesitant to purchase Centera because there's no second source."
Fast-forward less than three years.
EMC just announced an API that allows customers to choose someone else.
