In 1996, I joined the CLARiiON team to work on a new Storage Resource Management product. It was a management software leap to go along with the leap forward from SCSI to Fibre Channel. We looked at everything that was “wrong†about the existing solutions, took into account new requirements based on the scalability of the new hardware, updated our products to use the leading edge technologies, and created something entirely new – Navisphere. It was a huge splash for CLARiiON, and helped define everything I think of as successful in a software project.
Fifteen years later, I’m writing about a new big splash for EMC in the SRM space – ProSphere 1.0. I’ll stop you right here and tell you that you need to go read Chuck’s post on the product. I can’t out-do his deep-dive into the industry angles and why it’s such a big deal, so I won’t even try.
What I will tell you is why working on this product was so different from any other product I’ve touched at EMC, and why I’m so proud to be able to announce it here. Just like fifteen years ago, it was a chance to take a look at everything “wrong†while also still looking in new directions at the same time the industry is making another scale leap with Cloud environments. This has been some of the hardest work I’ve done here at EMC. But seeing it get out the door is making it all worth it.
