All Geekness Great and Small

Archive for January, 2009

Last week, I completed a paper on Visualizing SAN Volume Controller FlashCopy Mapping.

SAN Volume Controller (SVC), for those who don’t know, is a block level, in-band, storage virtualization appliance. FlashCopy is a function of SVC which allows you to take instant copies of a whole volume, capturing a single point in time.

As an SVC environment grows, disks become copies of disks and one disk can have multiple disks copied from it. This paper discusses a method to visualize these relationships graphically so that a Storage Administrator can understand the state of his system at a glance.

The paper also acts as a demonstration of automation of the SVC Command Line Interface, with the hope that readers will go on to write their own scripts for their own automation purposes.

“Cloud computing” is the latest in a long line of technology buzzwords that nobody really seems to understand… or should I say that everybody claims to know what it means, but nobody seems to agree. Today, whurley published an open letter to Barack Obama advocating the creation of a computing cloud for use by all colleges and universities.

By advocating a use for cloud computer, whurley helps define what cloud computing can actually be and what it can achieve. For many researchers, the barrier to progress is not academic insight but technological capability. By making the necessary computing resources available to all, cloud computing can help lower this barrier and ignite a great leap forward in the academic field.

Cloud computing, in this respect, brings to mind such projects as SETI@Home and BOINC. Under these projects, the computing resources of idle desktops and laptops were made available to researchers working on computationally intensive research. While extra-terrestrial life still eludes us, over 1000 teraflops are made available each day to research projects who need them. Imagine what could be achieved with the full weight of government backing and the right infrastructure.

It was 1880 when Joseph Swan got his patent for the light-bulb. It wasn’t until 1926 that the Parliamentary Act to establish the UK National Power Grid was passed, allowing everyone to benefit from electric light. It was in 1951 that William Shockley got his patent for the junction transistor. Fifty-eight years later, it’s time we had a national infrastructure to bring the benefit of computing power to those who need it most.

I’ve been playing with technology for nearly 25 years, ever since my parents bought a ZX Spectrum 48K for my siblings and me. My brother and I would faithfully copy program listings from books, play the games that those listings created and then merrily modify them to our own ends. We also had a huge disorganised box of Lego and whiled away many a Saturday building models from plans and imagination (for British readers: many of these models were inspired by ‘Chock-A-Block’).

As time passed, my interest in technology evolved. At school, I was developing an interest in Physics, at home I was writing my own programs on a 286s, 386s and 486s. By the time I got to university, I was majoring in Physics and working for Milford Instruments in my vacations. During that time I learnt all about writing microcode and getting chips to talk to one another.

I now work for IBM. I started in their development laboratory and, although my primary role is more customer facing at the moment, I’m still writing plenty of code.

So, why the name and what’s the aim of this blog? Well, my interest in technology is both parallel and orthogonal to my job in technology. However, I’ll be writing about both and so some of the discussions will be about ‘great’ things like Storage subsystems and Automation frameworks and other broad topics; others will be about ‘small’ things, like rotary encoders and relays and my latest home project. By keeping the lines between my home technology and work technology blurred, I can transfer my experiences from one to the other and both will benefit. I encourage you to do the same.