Musings from within

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Introduction

Tuesday Jan 08, 2008

Who am I?

Simple question that could be answered many ways but I am a person who tries to be as efficient as possible. I live by Alton Brown's mantra of disliking single use tools and opting for the multi-taskers. The intent of this blog is to stir thought, make people think, and challenge status quo.

Background:

Having progressed the ranks here at SunIT and survived many rounds of re-orgs and such... I find myself writing this blog as a Data Center Architect for SunIT. Back in 1997 was brought on board to be a system administrator, supporting Sun remote field sites. Due to some Business Process Outsourcing, my role as an SA came to an end. From there I relocated from Boston area to Sun's new campus in Colorado, around 1998. Was brought to CO to assist the front line tech support folks as well as handle special projects that the BPO technical team could not handle. From there I joined a group called Beta on Sun. My role was to join beta Sun products within the SunIT production environment. The goal was to flush out any issues before external customers found them.

Beta on Sun was an interesting time as the value add was significant. We saw bugs on products that Q&A could never see until the product was in production. Examples of bugs were related to application interactions, real time load, etc. There were some interesting bugs we found at SunIT that were fixed before the products went out the door.

After doing a few years in that role, I moved onto Storage Architecture for SunIT. This was my first step from SA role to design role (not just operational design either). Around that time Sun was also doing some major cost cutting via layoffs and project re priorities. This is where one had to be extremely creative in doing more with less. User's expected greater level of support, performance, access, etc whilst they didn't want to pay for it. Sound familiar? We had all the desires at the time to implement new solutions like Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Data Classification, Storage Resource & Asset Management, etc but due to other higher priorities the list above took a back seat. Some accomplishments we did implement was core to edge SAN implementation, Tape Area network, rewrite of the Data Retention plan, creation of a complete end to end Disaster Recovery solution, expanding NFS into different tiers of the data centers, and implementation of WAN accelerators for DR links (more on this topic later).

Currently:

I am the Data Center Architect for SunIT and I have quite a few things on my to do list such as: