Information Playground

The Company You Keep

Last week I attended a conference. I interacted with some of the smartest people you'll ever meet. Who are they?

They are the people that take care of the world's data.  They've been given the incredibly hard task of storing, retrieving, securing, organizing, searching, and protecting your most critical information. In fact, if you have a bank account, a credit card, a cell phone, a mortgage, or a car, or if you've taken a vacation or made a trip to the hospital recently, then it's likely that they've taken care of your data in some important way.

I have attended EMC's Innovation Conference both years.  This year I noticed that EMC invited a large percentage of junior talent from around the world. Two friends of mine from China "won" a plane ticket to the US to present their innovative ideas. One of my co-workers from Russia also won a seat. I presented an idea while standing next to a junior engineer from France. I also met several employees from India.

Employees that could not attend in person had the option to interact via multi-directional live video feeds and chat technology.

How would I sum up this conference in one sentence?  That's easy.

I love this place.

The Innovation Pitch

Yesterday the EMC Innovation Showcase began, and I spent a large part of the day on my feet pitching my idea for "Solving the 100 Year Problem". Thirty finalists were standing in front of posters of their idea whilst the executives quizzed us on our proposals.

I received a bit of heckling from a non-executive who somehow snuck in without an invite to the private judging session. This was the first time I had met Mark Twomey in person. ;>)

My idea was centered around the problem of not only the preservation of digital content, but also the ability to interpret the content data format for years to come. Not surpringly, at the center of my proposal was a unique product custom made for digital preservation.

Centera.

The Innovative Week Ahead

This afternoon I'm driving from my office in Southborough down to Hopkinton to meet up with some co-workers from China that I haven't yet met (face-to-face).  Both of them worked on my third-place idea from last year's Innovation Conference. They built the idea and it was demonstrated at EMC World in May of 2008. We've continued to work together and have also generated new ideas which were subsequently accepted for this year's contest.

Needless to say I'm looking forward to meeting them in person and deepening both the friendship and the working relationship.

It's the beginning of what for me will be an excellent week:

EMC Innovation Showcase 2008.

Farm Animals as Gifts

David K Spencer just pointed out on Twitter that it's Blog Action Day 08 - thanks Dave.

On October 15th participating bloggers can write something about the topic of poverty.

My wife and I have an end-of-year tradition we've been keeping for several years now. We've been giving our families, friends, and neighbors a unique present.

We've been giving them farm animals.

The 100 Year Paper Clip

One of the requirements faced by digital archivists is the guarantee that archived content will still be accessible and available for years to come. SNIA has written a report on this topic. The crisis described in the paper needs a solution. Will the digital content of today still be viewable and useful in 100 years?

There are many challenges to be solved in building such an archive. One of the more daunting challenges is to manage the relationships between the content being archived (e.g. a photograph or scanned document) and the meta-data describing the content. Wouldn't it be useful to have some sort of giant paper clip to permanently join together all of the disparate artifacts that relate to the digitized content?

Instead of pounding away at this problem with a hammer let's use paper clips instead. And let's use the latest in paper-clip technology.

XAM.

Centera. It's Academic.

East Carolina University's (ECU) data center had been experiencing two common problems: (a) explosive data growth, and (b) loooooong backup windows.

They continue to experience explosive data growth.  Backups, however, have shrunk from 10 hours down to minutes.

Academically speaking, they realized that a huge percentage of their data was unchanging. Unchanging data is also known as fixed content.  In order to reduce backup windows, ECU turned to the one storage system synonymous with fixed content.

Centera.