Some Interesting Tech I’ve Been Involved With Lately
Bob Balaban April 20 2013 05:58:50 PM
Greetings, geeks!Some of you have been wondering what I've been up to lately. No, not a stealth-mode startup, not a new API for Notes/Domino, nothing like that.
In fact, I'm at about the 6-month mark in a whole new (to me) tech area: storage and storage management. It's one of those things that's a whole lot more complicated than you'd ever think, until you start to dig into it. Me, I thought a "disk" started and ended with that box on the end of a USB cable that you plug into a laptop. No. That's just the simplest kind of disk.
Anyway, I now work at a company called NetApp, that makes the most advanced storage systems (and no, a "storage system" is not a closet-organizer!) on the market. I tried (as always) to explain to my mom and dad what I do all day, and it was hard, they're not "computer people". But I found some awesomely cool writeups that at least start to illustrate what goes on in the world of storage, and I thought I'd share.
First, CERN. We all know that anything having to do with CERN is automatically very cool. Here's some stuff on what NetApp does for CERN:
http://www.netapp.com/us/media/ds-3365-0812.pdf
High-energy proton collision experiments generate a LOT of data, very quickly (I heard it can be at rates around 6 gigabytes per second), and you have to have "storage" that can accommodate it.
So that's how my company mainly makes money, "storage systems". But that's not the area I work in myself. I'm working on a product called "OnCommand/Insight" (OCI), which is more on the data center management side of things. It inventories all of the important devices in your data center (storage, of course, but also switches, "hosts" (VMs and so on) etc.), and reports not only on the inventory (what devices you have, what's connected to what, like that), but on the performance and utilization of those devices: do you have storage that isn't being used by anyone? Do you have redundant connectivity from hosts to disks? Do you have RAID arrays that need servicing? And so forth.
Here's a page that describes more comprehensively than I can here what it's all about:
http://www.netapp.com/us/products/management-software/oncommand-insight/insight-library.aspx
So, it's great fun. NetApp is a good company to work for, the technology is interesting and pretty deep, and it really makes a big difference to a lot of people, even if it's mostly "back-room". When you hear about "big data", or "analytics" or "cloud", start thinking NetApp!
Geek ya later!
Follow me on Twitter @LooseleafLLC
This article ©Copyright 2013 by Looseleaf Software LLC, all rights reserved. You may link to this page, but may not copy without prior approval.
- Comments [0]