Getting down to Brass Tacks (well almost…)

OK, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and start a blog on Storage Area Networks.  Why now?  Well…thanks to things like FCoE, there’s a lot going on and a ton of new things to learn.  I figure as I’m learning and figuring out what makes sense in our lab, I’d share some of those experiences and maybe make someone else’s life easier. 

 

To give you a bit of an idea of whom I am, I’ve been working with Fibre Channel in various capacities over the past 11 years for EMC.  I started with the “Stampede” product line, now known as “Connectrix”, and my first job was to make sure the “dial home” server didn’t hang from all of the McDATA ED-1032 dial homes.  After that, I spent a brief amount of time in the PSE lab before joining level 2 Tech Support as a member of the ESN (Enterprise Storage Network) team.  From there it was off to E-Lab and I’ve been there for the past 7 years. 

 

In E-Lab, as a member of the IOP team, my first set of responsibilities was to qualify new McDATA firmware and hardware.  Since then I’ve helped to re-write the EMC Networked Storage Topology Guide, co-authored two EMC Tech books (SAN concepts and Protocols and the FCoE Tech book), presented at EMC world a handful of times and joined T11 as one of EMC’s Alternates.

 

Along the way I’ve made probably every mistake you can imagine and all indications are I will continue this tradition going forward!  Sometimes the root cause for a mistake is a simple case of PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair) but more frequently I find that documentation is to blame.  This is one of the reasons why like participating in the creation and re-writing of documentation.  I know the pain of trying to figure something out using poor documentation. 

 

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to focus on the some of the new improvements we are making to the Networked Storage Topology Guide as well as the Nexus 5000 / Nexus 2232 configuration we just added to the October release.  After that I’m planning to discuss our experiences with vPC and provide an update to the proposals that we are working on in T11.  Things a still a bit up in the air but that’s the plan anyway… 

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Erik