Last November must have been innovation month in the blogosphere as a variety of the storage blogging crew weighed in on “innovation”. I found the discussions to be thought-provoking and indeed have continued to think about the issue since that time. Discussions, for example, were found here, here, and here.
The reason this topic interests me so much is that my career has been guided by continual transfers to new teams that I find “innovative”. Starting over has disadvantages (lack of visibility) and advantages (lack of visibility [as in I don’t have to wear a suit and tie]).
After the blogo-banter about innovation, Stephen Foskett proposed his list of Top Ten Innovative Enterprise Storage Products, and Marc followed with his own.
CLARiiON made Stephen’s list. I worked on the CLARiiON microcode for about seven years. I agree with the assessment that CLARiiON was (and is) innovative.
But was I?
Innovative or Creative?
As an employee (of Data General) working on an innovative product (one of the first RAID5, hot pluggable, mirrored write cache disk arrays), I’ve always felt that my initial efforts on the microcode were creative but not innovative.
Allow me to explain.
Writing CLARiiON’s RAID5 algorithms was essentially my first big job out of college. The idea for RAID5 was not mine. The idea for the microcode’s architecture was not mine. I walked into a project where the architecture was complete and it was up to me to design my piece. I had a blank sheet of paper. Within this context I was given the freedom to be creative. I used known software design techniques and best practices to craft the code. It was my creation. I didn’t have an opportunity to be innovate (at the beginning).
At the time I thought most of the innovative work was occuring in the “hot pluggable” nature of the product. Putting a handle on a disk drive and ripping it live out of a system was unheard of (and made for quite a jaw-dropping demo back in the day). CPUs could also be ripped out of a live system. The electro-mechanical design, as well as the system’s handling of the resulting I/O and backplane disturbance, was fairly innovative in my book.
The error handling software was where I had my first chance to be innovative. During the “creation” of the software, I ran into problems where a customer problem could occur and I had no answer for how to solve the problem. I had to think long and hard to find new technologies to bring into my solution. One example of innovation for me involved growing sector sizes to 520 bytes and innovating via the parity shedding solution.
Bring It Forward
If I were to take a survey of all of the blog posts I’ve written, I can certainly see a tendency to write about products and software that I’ve worked on that I find to be cool and/or innovative.
I’ve written several posts about private clouds. I’m drawn to it. Why? Because a while back I started thinking about how to implement a fully virtualized storage system shipped as a file instead of a piece of hardware. It’s an attempt to solve a customer problem (ease-of storage deployment, management, mobility, etc) for which I had no answer. I have to find something outside of myself by talking to new people and learning new technologies and techniques.
Innovation.
Sounds fun, eh? Hey, ‘Zilla says we’re hiring.
Steve
