Blatant Thievery

Note:  This post was migrated from my old blog site after that hosting site decided to sunset personal blogs.

Is it still plagiarism if you are crediting the  original author?  Anyway,  this should have been my first post, or at least included in my first post. I stole  the idea from  Sebastian Thaele.

Yay!  Yet another storage-related blog!  As if the world needed another one.   The difference with this one  is it is written by me, which by itself should be enough to make everyone want to read it.   Seriously, while I think I'm pretty good at what I do, I'm not that hubristic.   I know that I don't have all the answers.  Nobody does.   That being said, here's why I created this blog.  

First, I wanted to give a bit of an insider's view into IBM Storage Support.   This previous post of mine is an example of that.

Second, I work as a world-wide Product Field Engineer for IBM SAN Central.  My team is  Level 2/Level 3 (depending on who's asking)  support on problems related to  Storage Networking.   If the other IBM product teams can't solve the problem or suspect it may be the SAN, the case is escalated to my team.       Many other professions exchange knowledge with peers from other companies, but  this rarely happens for members of support organizations. By necessity there is a lot of knowledge sharing amongst the members of my team and across the support teams inside IBM but its too often limited to just IBM.  

Third,  most of the blogs I read will focus on marketing or high-level overviews of a new product or feature, but there isn't much technical content, and what technical content there is  does not have a support perspective.   For instance, I've stumbled across more than one blog post regarding IBM announcing Spectrum Storwize code v8.1.  Among other things, the code supports a new feature for hot-spare SVC nodes.  That's a great feature, but there are some requirements to implement a hot-spare node along with some best-practice recommendations when implementing it.  I will have a future post detailing both the requirements and how to best implement the hot-spare node.  ​The best way to fix a problem is to prevent it in the first place.  I'm hoping posts like that one will help prevent future problems occuring for IBM's customers.



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