Recently we’ve had a bit of a senior management reshuffle and as a result, people are in ;prove that their teams are valuable’ mode again. Inevitably this means producing metrics to show why your team is brilliant, so my manager came along and asked me to produce some metrics about our storage estate.
So off I went and produced some pretty graphs showing storage growth, increase in number of technologies supported and some other things that I thought might show why my team does an excellent job. One of the problems with running a very good team is that they tend to have a relatively low visibility; they don’t cause problems and things don’t often break. Most of the time, people don’t know that we are here.
Anyway, as is the way of these things; the usual comment comes back; how many terabytes per head do we manage and what is the industry average? Now with over two petabytes of active data per head under management, I could claim that my team is great but to be honest no-one really knows what the industry average is and would it be meaningful anyway? I’ve seen from 50Tb to 1 Petabyte quoted but with a figure of 150-200Tb most oft quoted; so my team could be good, great or downright amazing (it’s somewhere between the last two).
However, this is all meaningless and becomes more meaningless the more that industry changes. For example, we are managing what is closer to a big-data environment; big data environments have large infrastructures but if I am being honest, they are not especially hard to manage.
We rely on a fair amount of automation and standardisation; applications often do a lot of the storage management function and although the storage infrastructure grows, it tends not to change massively. Allocations are large but they tend to be relatively static; in that once allocated, it does not move around a lot; we make a lot of use of clustered file-systems and most of the work we do is non-disruptive. We add nodes in and even if node fails, it tends not to take every thing with it; we can live with a node down for weeks; the applications are resilient and services can generally cope with failures.
We have our busy times but it does generally run pretty smoothly; most of our time is spent on working out how we can make it run even more smoothly and how we improve the service, which in my opinion is exactly how it should be. The best support teams look busy but not stressed; hero cultures are not where it’s at.
So I’ve given my boss a figure but I am really not sure that it has a lot of value. Lies, Damn Lies and Metrics!
and really hit form again; William Gibson’s 
was full of ideas and great fun but for me, a new City Watch tale from Terry Pratchett was always going to be the highlight. 
. I think it is a credit to Steve and his family that this rounded picture of him was allowed. A deeply flawed genius; this book does not shy away from the flaws whilst painting the picture of the driven genius. If you love Apple or even if you hate Apple, it’s worth reading and perhaps reflecting on the bit of Steve which is in us all, certainly Biography of the Year. 
is a allegorical tale of technology introduction in education; I think many of my readers will both find relevant and fun [especially recommended to Chuck Hollis and Matthew Yeager].
; as power continues to move eastwards and China continues its rise to become the dominant economic super-power, this book details how China has pulled itself out of the doldrums and transform its economy. Anecdotes are well used to demonstrate ideas and why China will not transform into a Western-style democracy any time soon.
by Emily Baker, 
by Arctic Monkeys and especially enjoyed the collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica in the form of 
. The return of Atari Teenage Riot’s aural assault was a welcome return by the Teutonic terrors, 
my stand-out album of the year. As English as it gets, PJ’s anger and passion for our homeland’s current place in the world is a powerful piece from an artist who never fails to push our buttons.
; Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was an award winning first novel when it was published 1985, pretty much everyone knows that it was semi-autobiographical but now Jeanette Wintersone has gone back and written the real story. And what everyone assumed was exaggerated for effect actually turn out to be true or actually they put a more cheery gloss than what was the lonely reality.
; Francis Walsingham is often credited with creating the English secret service and the first great English spymaster. To be honest, there are few good books about him and I don’t think there is one which places him so well in the period.
is his second collection of short stories covering a variety of settings from an alternate 19th century Oxford to the more familiar setting of his Commonwealth novels.