About Us

Information about the bloggers of RupturedMonkey.com ...

I'm currently working as a Storage Engineer and living in sunny Florida.

I began working in IT in 1998 after a four year stint in the US Army.  I began focusing on storage back in 2001 and have loved learning everything I can about it.  The best part for me is gathering a users requirements and designing and implementing a solution for them.  Seeing their face light up after everything is in place and working as expected is like watching my kids on Christmas morning.

I have worked with EMC², HP, Compaq, and Hitachi disk storage as well as Veritas NetBackup and ADIC tape libraries.  I have all the Brocade certifications and really dig their switches and directors and always have.

The main reason I started RupturedMonkey.com was because I wanted a place where end users and vendors could come together and share information and be open about things with each other.  I've seen it grow tremendously the past few years and I can only hope that users continue to get together to help each other with problems and solutions.

Nigel Poulton (nigelpoulton@hotmail.com)
I'm currently a free lance storage consultant living with my wife and daughter in the UK.

I was bitten by the storage bug while working on Comaq EVA kit a few years ago, and as they say "the rest is history". Although I work a lot with Hitachi storage, I'm interested in all things storage and think of myself as fairly unbiased.  I don't profess to be the best, in fact I'll admit I'm not. However, I have a bit of experience, and a keen interest in whats going on and where storage is headed.

One of the main reasons I blog is that I love storage, including talking about it. Blogging is one of the ways I share my knowledge and experiences as well as learning from some of the top quality comments and feedback I've received to my posts. In my opinion quality storage blogs are a great tool for people wanting to learn storage as well as the seasoned pro.

I also like the way some of the vendors are getting involved by reading our stuff here on RM as well as leaving feedback. While its not the reason that I blog its obviously a positive side effect.

Feel free to contact me on my email address above. I'm willing to entertain a wide variety of good storage work including writing articles.

I am working for a large (currently the second largest in the world based on invested capital) pension fund, which is based in the far south region in the Netherlands.

I started at this firm in 1996, as an I/O operator. This meant I had to exchange  the large paper rolls from the massive form printers. These boys processed up to 14000 forms per hour. Doing the daily tape vaulting was also part of the job.  In 1998 I managed to get promoted to the console operator function. I was first introduced to the open systems world here. In 2000 I was selected by the storage admins of that time to come in and reinforce their team. My primary task was to manage the Windows NT server backups. These were done by ntbackup, but were to be moved to IBM's ADSM 3.1 (which is currently called TSM). Today we still use TSM.

After a while we introduced the Brocade Silkworm 2800 switches, and the firm's SAN was born. It grew fast into a dual redundant fabric in a core-edge design. For a couple of years there was no one to manage it but me. In 2005 I finally got some help. In January 2006 I planned, designed and directed the migration to the current McData director farm which stretches two sites, geographically dispersed, over 4 CWDM / native fibre links.

Our shop has always been an IBM only shop. For the next few years, this will not change. IBM won the deal, primarily by pricing.

As of may first (2007) I am working as a freelance storage consultant/specialist. 

For more details on me, I refer to the LinkedIn website, were my profile sits, and awaits you ;-)

stephen2615 (mds.user@gmail.com)

I live in sunny and often drought ridden Australia and work for the Federal Government.

I have a degree in Computer Science and have done quite a bit of post graduate study in IT related fields.

I spent 15 years in the NAVY and was managing extremely interesting IT systems for the last 6 of those years.

Most of my IT career (18 years) has been looking after UNIX where I specialised in high end solutions mostly with Sun.   My first external storage using FC and Veritas was in 1997 and I have not looked back.  I have watched the change from direct attached to Vixel hubs to FC switches and now Directors (a big MDS fan).  I first got into HDS storage in 1998 where I was involved in the biggest (at that time) SAP installation in the world and have used a mixture of both HDS/Sun/HP high end stuff with HDS/Sun/HP/IBM lower end.  Note the exclusion of EMC.

In the middle I was an Enterprise Management specialist where I became a Certified Openview Consultant and I just love Smarts Incharge which is a pity because EMC purchased Smarts a couple of years ago.  Best job ever as no one ever had a clue what I was doing and the money was good.  Sort of like Storage now.

I have designed some particularly huge single systems but that's about all I can say about it. 

I avoid backup solutions like the plague.

I am currently well on my way to getting a CCIE in Storage Networking and perhaps getting SNIA and/or HDS certified.  Why, because work pays for it.

Most of my non government work was mostly in Telco (including Pay TV) and the Finance industries.

I have two Burmese cats, anyone want them?