PICC Day 2

Day 2 of the PICC conference was little more scattered and varied than the first one. The first session was "The Evolution of Storage Networking and the Current Trends in the Industry." Jacob Farmer, CTO of Cambridge Computer led this session. Jacob's talk was a exactly what the title says. He talked about storage virtualization and how abstraction layers interract with the Operating system and the File System. Most of the concepts were as I imagined they would be, although its nice to know the "real" names for things. I learned that the Equallogic SANs that I have at work are using "spindle virtualization." In short, this means that you don't have to worry about carving up your SAN into various LUNs, each (possibly) having different RAID configurations. When you setup the Equalllogic, you format it (RAID 5, 6, 10, or whatever you want) and then only worry about the size of the partitions that you create. This allows you to easily add additional storage by adding another unit to the "cluster." Personally, I think this is a cooler method of dealing with SANs.

I only stayed for the first half of this talk because I wanted to go to a couple other sessions. Next I went to "Pushing Boulders Uphill: NOAA Updates - High Performance Computing across the WAN." [In my best "Staples" commercial voice] "Wow, that's a long title" The speakers gave an overview of how NOAA deals with their datasets. Its amazing how much data they move around their network on a daily basis. More importantly, some of the discussion was about how the grew their network and some of the tools they use. It was amazing to see how "simple" it was, albeit from a very high level overview. Even better, they use some of the same (open source) tools that I use to monitor their network. I must be doing something right.

Directly after this, Matt Simmons led a discussion on "Keeping Nagios Sane." More than any other, this session demonstrated what community is about. Matt started the session by stating that he wasn't an expert, but these were the things that worked for him. Most of the participants in the session use Nagios and contributed some of their ideas during the discussion. Could any of us be considered "experts"? Maybe. Depending on your definition.

Sometimes, I get a little annoyed when my coworkers or others call me an "expert." What does that mean? I know what I know. But, that's not everything there is to know. Usually I know more about my field than they do. Do I know everything? Of course not. I think what separates us from the paper admins is our ability to get up to speed quickly in a variety of areas. Often, this is driven by our quest for knowledge. Sometimes, we actually need to do something with what we learn. What separates this profession from most others is that there are always several ways to accomplish a task. Some of them are more elegant than others and some are just crazy ideas that lead to some cool discovery. I should probably finish this post before I go off on a rant. BTW, Matt, check out cacti for trending.

Next I went to a session of Budgeting for System Administrators given by Adam Moskowitz. Alan gave some very cogent advice to us regarding the budget process. Sometimes we tend to forget that those above us may not understand the buzzwords. We need to be show them what our needs are in a language that they can understand and relate to. Also, they may not fully understand the inter-relatedness (is that a word?) of the various parts of our projects. Finally, sometimes we have to be willing to compromise and either scale-back or phase in our projects.

After this, my brain needed a break and I attended an "Unconference" This was probably the closest to what most people would imagine would happen if a group of techies got together in a room to just discuss a topic, except most of us were totally worn out at that point. We ended up talking about DNS, specifically, how we each manage it. We were shown Carnegie-Mellon's NetReg by one of the the people who wrote it. How cool is that. I had looked at it a couple of times before, but didn't realize its power. It's not something that I would use in my current environment, but I know its out there if the need arises.

The last session I attended was "An overview of Google's Technologies...." given by Tom Limoncelli. It was kind of fitting that I started and ended with the same speaker. Tom gave a quick overview of Google and how they grew their infrastructure. More cool stuff to keep in the back of my head.

Overall, it was a good conference and I had a blast. I met some new and interesting people. (And not the weirdos that are usually drawn to me) Kudos to William Bilancio, Tom Limoncelli, and the entire planning and organizing committees. They've already begun to consider the next conference and I'm sure this one will be even better.