A Honeycomb Belongs in a Garden: Data Storage meets the world

Since I joined Sun a year and a half ago I have been working on the metadata team for the StorageTek 5800 intelligent storage archive. Currently I am the technical lead for the metadata and searchability features of this fixed content data storage appliance.

You have probably heard that the code name for the StorageTek 5800 was Project Honeycomb. I guess all the scalability features of this scalable archive reminded someone of the cells in a hive. Everything in the StorageTek 5800 is built on a foundation of reliability, affordability, and scalability. Using commodity hardware and novel algorithms, we can build an extremely reliable archive out of cheap parts, just the way a hive is built out of tiny cells.

But the other part of an intelligent storage archive is making it searchable. After all, if simply archiving huge amounts of data for long periods of time is your only requirement, you may as well use a magnetic tape library or a sailboat full of tape. The practical side of this blog is that I will be describing how to use the searchability features of the StorageTek 5800 in particular, as well as exploring the whole topic of archive searchability in general.

I also am interested in understanding better what exactly our customers plan to do with an intelligent storage archive. People seem to love the idea of embedding processing power close to the data to facilitate processing the data (and querying it) right close to where the data is actually stored. But this is a relatively new paradigm. There is no well-established standard that describes how to integrate an intelligent archive into an enterprise. There is likely to be an evolution over time.

That's where the metaphor of a garden comes in.

If the enterprise is like a garden, then perhaps the intelligent storage box is like a new hive of honeybees being added to the garden. A new honeybee hive will probably do the garden a world of good. The overall health of the garden will improve, and not always in obvious ways. Will adding an intelligent storage archive to an existing data center have a similar effect? Time will tell. My original title for this blog was "A Honeycomb Belongs in a Garden". It was a reminder to me to think not about yet one more box one could add to a data center, but to think instead about how it fits into the environment around it. Without understanding the garden you cannot really understand the honeycomb.

I wondered for a while whether to avoid mentioning anything about bees, given the recent issues with bees disappearing from their hives. But it ends up an even richer metaphor for the garden. Here's where I let my opinions show. Treating bees like factory workers and not as part of nature contributes to the current stresses on their survival. It is possible to act in co-creative partnership with nature. It is about time we get good at partnering (both with ourselves and with nature), or our chances for long-term survival will experience just as much stress as the bees do now.

Which explains while I will also be blogging about two of my current "hobbies" or outside of work interests.

I have been exploring a co-creative approach to nature by designing and building a whole new garden around the two-family house where I live. In my history, I have never been a great gardener. (I have normally agreed with a recent New York Times columnist where he said that his normal idea of gardening was to check back in every 3 weeks to see what else had died.) But my mother nudged me to get started on a new design for my whole back yard with the lovely ladies at Tacita Gardens.

And recently the co-creative approach to gardening of Machaelle Small Wright and the Perelandra Center for Nature Research came to my attention, and now I cannot get enough of it. Although they also started small, they are very aware that the principles of working in partnership with nature go real deep, and it has developed into a very broad and deep stream of knowledge. Somehow it has been just the right idea at the right time. I'll let you know how it goes as the garden comes into form over the next year or so, and as I keep working with the Perelandra ideas and materials, and with the nature in my own yard. (Down the road, I am even thinking of raising bees...)

My other outside interest I will be bringing in from time to time is the work of Contegrity Program Designs. Contegrity is an approach to fulfilling life. What is fulfillment? Think about communication at its best. The kind of communication of which Carl Jung once said, "like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction at all, both are transformed". Communication is connected, not separate. It is free, yet also very intentional. And it is worth studying and making a part of your life. Fulfilling life is like that, yet across more dimensions than just communication. It is a practical discipline, yet spiritual as well. It is a great joy to have a community of people, and a well-worked out body of knowledge, that study how to tell the difference of what goes towards fulfilling life and what does not.

(Updated to fix link to Contegrity.)