When I was asked to work on this ambassador project for SolarWinds, to help generate conversation here on thwack I had all kinds of ideas (and apparently no pen), and now that it is time for pen to paper or where the rubber meets the road, the topics have taken a bit of a hiatus. Its much like any experience I have in the iTunes music store… I have a pile of music hat I want to download, but as soon as I get to iTunes, I have no idea what to do or where to go first. That is what getting into storage was like for me as well, a bit overwhelming but also a huge learning opportunity.
My experience has been very education heavy in that I figured out a good portion of the configuration for my organizations array and virtualization setup on my own, with a few calls to EMC support when things just didn’t make sense. But with that bit of help I did get it working and now it is running a good portion of our environment. Until that point, virtualization was for demos on a laptop and storage was a few portable USB drives in my bag. The fact that there is a whole industry and tons of ways to slice information about storage still amazes me.
To get this series of posts started, I was working to find a hot technology that would get the ball rolling, like deduplication or cloud (more on that down the road), but that didn’t seem like a good way to get started. Being someone who really started learning about storage and truly taking an interest in it on an after thought because of a bit of faith from Microsoft which grew very quickly, I thought finding out a bit about the thwack users who frequent the storage area (pardon me for not going with storage geeks, but I didn’t want to offend anyone right off the bat) might be a good way to open the discussion.
Now that you know a bit about me, and how I got into storage, its your turn.
What brought you into the storage arena, requirements of the job?
- Genuine interest?
- A fluke?
In addition what is the coolest thing you have learned in storage and where do you think this technology will be in the next one to two years?
Is there a particular storage technology, Object based storage, flash based caching that you have been curious about or working with now that you feel is the next big thing?
