Information Playground

February Madness

It's February 29th. If you're a college hoops fan, you might not be happy, because March has been delayed for a day.

The "March Madness" NCAA College Basketball tournament is my favorite sports event to watch. The effort that you see on the court by college students, laying it all out on the line for their school, is awesome. And it's pretty much a guarantee that you're going to see some fantastic finishes.

But tonight I'm driving up to my high school in North Andover, Massachusetts. My high school coach is still on the sidelines. The extra day in February on a Friday night means that high school teams all over the country will be playing playoff basketball.

February Madness.

Quality Concerns

This first part of my blog is known as the "teaser". Hopefully it convinces the reader to view the rest of the blog. In this case, I'll be a little more up front.

You might not want to read this blog. It's a little dry. Some might call it uninteresting. It's about the foundational failure handling techniques first employed in the original CLARiiONs. If I were to compare talking about this topic to talking about an American football game, we'd be talking about the offensive versus the defensive line: in the trenches. (by the way, wasn't the last Super Bowl won in the trenches? Think NY Giants defensive line....).

So, who should read this post?

Customers that are considering a RAID solution. You should know that shipping quality RAID systems is a huge challenge. RAID solutions come and go. So this post is for customers.

Especially the ones that really, really, really care about the integrity of their data.

Secretary of State

After graduating from college I started working on the RAID-5 algorithms.  Nearly every Friday afternoon at 3PM I would walk over to my boss and tell him I had found another problem with the design of the (eventual) CLARiiON software. He would groan when he saw me coming. Because usually we wouldn't be able to solve it before quitting time, and therefore we'd have to drag unfinished business into the drive home. Not a good way to start the weekend.

"Next time just tell me on Monday morning."

The RAID-5 algorithms were making a young college kid's head spin.

So I became the Secretary of State.

Centera Ins and Outs

One of the differences I like to point out about Centera as a storage system has to do with the device driver paradigm. Many customers are used to the following process: (a) buy a peripheral, and (b) download and install the driver to talk to the peripheral. If the peripheral was a block device, a customer might download a SCSI device driver.

There are no industry standard "object" device drivers (XAM may change this!).  You don't buy a Centera as "raw storage" and download an object device driver.

So how does one write data to a Centera? How do you get data off of a Centera?  How does one move data between Centera and other storage devices?

Let's talk.

Centera Matador

After nearly fifteen years of building block storage and SAN technologies, I joined the Centera organization. Talk about a different technology.

Talk about a breath of fresh air.

When I get asked for my opinion about the future of Centera, or of CAS, or of XAM, I use one word: bullish.

Because I've seen how it's built. Therefore I know what it can do. I don't think the technology has even come close to hitting its stride.

Here's why.

The Contest

You might have heard that EMC held an internal innovation contest back in October of 2007. It was a first for EMC. I was involved.

If you want to know what happens when over 400 innovators from around the world submit ideas, read on.

My idea was accepted for public presentation at a "science fair". My partner in crime was traveling, so it was up to me to do the presentation. The judges were made up of about a dozen high-level executives from within EMC, most of whom I did not know personally. In preparing for the big day I asked myself the age-old question that many software developers struggle with.

Should I wear a tie?

Information Playground

If it's not clear from my posts already, I get the chance at EMC to work on a variety of cool technologies and products.  There seems to be no end to the continual opportunities that exist to build innovative new software.

Having said that, I'd like to explain the title of my blog: Information Playground.  Both words in the title have specific meaning to me.  Let me dive into the "Playground" word first.

What playground structure has been most representative of life as a software developer in the storage industry?

The monkey bars.

Regen vs Rebuild

The ability for a storage system to recover from a disk failure is table stakes for block storage vendors. Customers expect fast disk rebuild times with minimal (if any) application performance disruption.

CLARiiON is no exception.  Customers that have bought an EMC CLARiiON box are familiar with how fast it recovers from disk failure.

How about EMC Centera?

Do The Math

I've been writing about the origins of RAID, observing the continual growth of CLARiiON, and commenting about the original software decisions that have fueled this growth.

As it is with many technologies, the word "RAID" originated in the academic community. It gained recognition with the Berkeley paper. How appropriate. Today's class is all about learning.  Customers buying RAID solutions need to worry about the three Rs:  readin', wRitin', and 'Rithmetic.

Now I'm sure you're saying: I understand the reading part, and I understand the writing part. RAID software at its essence is all about fast and protected reading and writing. 

So what's this about arithmetic?

Time to go back to school.