Information Playground

Vegas, Post-Contest

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!

Post-Vacation Blogging

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.

CLARiiON Parity Shedding

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.

All You Young Students

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.

Expert System

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.

A Word About XAM

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.

Looking for a Job?

One of my first interviews while in college was for a job building storage products. I clearly remember hearing a few acronyms that I didn't know.

During the interview there was one word that people kept saying over and over again. I didn't know what it meant. The more they used it, the more I thought to myself: "I need to find out what this word means".

What was the word?

Megabyte.

People + Objects = Centera

Increasing amounts of the world's personal information will be stored on Centera systems. I can prove it.

The month of March saw a number of announcements about Centera. The one that particularly caught my eye was the announcement about Finland's new health care system. The Social Insurance Institute of Finland (KELA) will use Centera as part of a solution to provide a centralized patient archive for all of Finland's 5.3 million citizens.

It wasn't just a Centera announcement. Other EMC products (such as Symmetrix and Documentum) were announced as part of a total solution.

This story provides more evidence of the "perfect storm" that continues to drive Centera adoption. Centera is getting better and better at managing billions of objects.

And there are billions of people out there.