StorageMojo at FAST 2008
Join me in San Jose, CA, February 26–29, 2008, for the latest in File And Storage Technologies.
Top researchers from academe and industry - NetApp, IBM, Microsoft, Data Domain, HP, Panasas, Yahoo, Seagate and more - will present their latest research. [Doesn't EMC do any research?]
There will be thought-provoking presentations. I’ve already downloaded a number of papers and plan to report on some in the next couple of weeks.
If you’d like to meet, please drop me a line in the comments or send an email to robinATthisdomainname. Libation bearers are especially welcome.
The StorageMojo take
A lot of great research (see Everything you know about disks is wrong) has been presented at past FAST conferences and this year looks to be no exception. The work on data corruption looks very promising.
I’m also looking forward to shooting some video for the StorageMojo YouTube channel. Yes, it’s looking a little threadbare right now, as technical difficulties have slowed me down - FCS2’s underpinnings could be a lot more robust - so FAST should be a good place to get some new content.
Comments and invites welcome. Does anyone know if EMC has ever presented at FAST? Update: Several commenters quickly assured me that EMC
- Does lots of research
- Has presented at FAST
- Prefers to present at ACM
Thanks for the links!
on February 10th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
EMC does a ton of research. 1/6th of the company is dedicated to development, research results are presented quarterly and it pours money into University research programs.
But given the option I’d rather present at the EMC Science Fair than at FAST. If the idea has merit it might get turned into a product.
http://stevetodd.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/the-contest.html
on February 10th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Career marketers tend to flounder in technical discussions, and ad hominem attacks tend not to stand up in person. So no?
on February 10th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
I think you are being a little harsh on EMC … it is not easy to get a paper accepted at FAST, perhaps the top conference in file and storage systems. (I have tried — and failed — several times. Sob!)
However, EMC’s Jason Glasgow is co-author of a paper on pNFS block layout, which will be presented at the Linux File Systems Workshop, a two-day, invitation-only meeting that precedes FAST. (The other two authors, Andy Adamson and Fred Isaman, work with me at CITI.) This work is more experimental in nature than the kind of things accepted for the FAST technical program.
But to answer the question, yes, EMC has presented at FAST, in fact one of the authors of the “Best Paper” at FAST ‘05 was from EMC. Furthermore, EMC’s David Black was invited to present a talk at FAST ‘02. In addition, EMC’s Ric Wheeler is on the FAST ‘08 program committee, and David was on the FAST ‘05 and FAST ‘02 program committees. So I think EMC is pretty well represented in the file and storage technologies research community.
on February 10th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Jiri Schindler is listed as being at EMC on this paper, though he probably did the work at CMU:
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast05/tech/schlosser.html
Also, David Black has been on the program committee several times. VMware might have had a paper or two as well.
on February 10th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
And I almost forgot EMC favors presenting at ACM events. I read these a few months ago. There’s more but you can dig them out yourself.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1272998.1273035&coll=GUIDE&dl=ACM&CFID=54422704&CFTOKEN=85948990
http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/staff/bios/ajuels/publications/pdfs/POR-preprint-August07.pdf
on February 10th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I misspoke.
To be honest I don’t know if the company prefers to present at ACM. I know I like it when it presents at ACM. (But that’s me since I personally see FAST as a bit too specialised.)
And read Steve Todd’s XAM thesis while you’re at it.
http://cs.unh.edu/ToddThesis.pdf
on March 3rd, 2008 at 11:54 am
In a somewhat belated response I would like to comment on the previous comments.
In the last 17 years or so EMC made almost all its profits and most of its income from the Symmetrix disk array. The chief architect of the Symmetrix, Nathan Vishlitzky has never published in a conference or academic journal. Nathan and former head of engineering Moshe Yanai are probably the most influential figures in storage over the last 20 years, but hardly anyone outside EMC (and many in EMC) knows Nathan.
Prior to working on storage systems he was a farmer. None of the other key figures in the development of the Symmetrix ever wrote a paper on storage, some though did write papers in algebraic topology, ergodic theory, algebraic geometry, number theory combinatorics and network flows, prior to joining EMC. At EMC they were too busy developing products to write papers. There is only 1 paper related to Symmetrix which was ever published (very recently), any other paper that you see is not related to EMC’s core bussiness (Symmetrix and Clarion).
I have been a consultant for the Symmetrix group for many years in the area of performance analysis. I am an academic so I did write papers on Symmetrix related work but apart from 1 paper they were all rejected from storage related conferences and journals (including FAST, multiple times), so I had to resort to other outlets for this work.