Storage R Us

forgive me father for i have sinned .. it's been over 2 years since my last blog entry - i must confess that it's just one of those things that's easy to put off for another day, but that day never comes until you seize it .. (carpe diem and all that corpus crapus) ..

anyhoo - there's a lot of exciting things that've been happening more recently in our storage software stack that i hope to delve into in the coming days, minutes, weeks, months and years .. but perhaps i should [re]-introduce myself and what i've been doing here the past 10+ years for the illustrious fireball in the sky:

year 1: internal system administration for the sun java centers (ah, the old professional service oriented java consulting days) .. this was an interesting exercise in promoting corporate communication and cooperation with a very small budget .. we focused a lot on building up aliases for cooperation and had a few machines that we found in various closets and through other sources to collaborate on some projects and internal development .. (let me just say that i thought i'd never see the day when sun consultants were welcome to tout whatever laptop and operating system they so desired, and our source would be completely opened)

years 2-10: various professional services engagements across the country .. ah from network solutions at their high time when they were split, to many hours at AT&T Wireless, AT&T corporate, many gov't jobs, hospitals, media companies, financial svc industries, and more .. always a blast implementing, testing, filing bugs, fixing, working around, proving and breaking many things

ever since the LSC acquisition back in 2001 (bringing us a wealth of experience from Control Data along with SAM-QFS) i've always had a special place in my heart for the filesystem and storage problem .. particularly as it relates to storage performance and global access issues .. it's been fun to see ZFS take the stage and integrate some lovely cache related goodness (ah - slab allocator on the VOP) and watch as the system folk took on a greater interest in storage issues (it's much more than an accessory you know) .. so i guess that's where I've really been focusing much of my efforts over the years .. for those of you who've i'd had the pleasure to work with over the years - it's always been a treat to hear of your problems and issues you're trying to solve as well as your experiences with sun (i have many of my own)