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Andrew_Todd

From Whiteboard to Las Vegas

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I initially joined HPE, or rather HP as it was back then, on a 13-month internship whilst studying for a degree in Computer and Network Engineering.  The internship was with the Storage R&D team who supported and encouraged me to fully embrace the opportunity.  They made it clear that I wasn’t there to make the tea’s or to do the work no one else wanted to do, but rather I was treated like any other member of the team and worked the same projects.  After graduating university and a period working for a digital media start-up company, I rejoined HPE as an entry level engineer, once again working with the Storage R&D team. 

One of my early career managers asserted that to truly excel as an engineer you need to seek out and embrace discomfort.  Essentially if you don’t look for opportunities to stretch yourself, you won’t reach your full potential.  In current times, this advice seems worthy of a YouTube channel but honestly when the advice was given, it was a revelation to me.  Now let’s be clear, seeking discomfort doesn’t come naturally to me and it would be untrue for me to say that I’ve followed this advice unwaveringly.  It has however led me to work on more varied projects, including preparing data protection devices for a couple of mountaineering brothers to take to Everest Base Camp. 

The sponsored event was part of an ongoing campaign demonstrating how HPE products work in extremes.  The data protection devices and all the equipment needed to demonstrate them, had to be able to be run from a bank of 12v batteries that would be shared with everyone else living at base camp.  Additionally, all the equipment required had to fit into a couple of Peli cases that could be flown out to Kathmandu, survive baggage handling, and then be transported to base camp by Yak. 

The brothers would be working under extreme conditions and so they visited HPE several times before the trip where I training on how to use the devices, providing them with simple concise instructions that they would hopefully understand at 17,600 feet above sea level.  Happily, the demonstration was a success, the brothers reached the summit of Everest, and they came back to HPE to share their stories of frostbite.

I have very long and varied back catalogue of projects I have worked on over the years, but I guess I should introduce the whiteboard and its relevance to Las Vegas.  It starts with Creative Days.  These occur every quarter, when the R&D teams block out five days where all meetings are cancelled, and regular project work is halted.  Instead engineers are given time to investigate, design and incubate ideas that could potentially become future tools, features, or products.

It was on one of these Creative Days, that another engineer and I stood in front of a whiteboard with a question; could we design a data path that could combine the features of a high performance deduplication engine with the infinitely scalable storage of S3?  The intention being to provide a solution where customers could get offsite protection of their data using cheap cloud-based storage without the inherent costs of transferring large amounts of data across the Internet.

Now it’s fair to say that applications like Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive, already provided simple single-instancing solutions where only unique files would get copied to their respective cloud storage.  But these were predominantly designed for protecting documents, not enterprise scale data protection where potentially terabytes of data would need protecting.

Through research and iterations of models we identified a whole bunch of challenges that would need to be solved but one main challenge stood out.  Designing a transactional model that could tolerate the eventual consistency attributes of S3 whilst also satisfying a requirement that everything needed for recovery was stored in S3 so that the data could truly be used for offsite protection.  We spent many Creative Days researching and testing ideas, returning the whiteboard to validate the design.  Eventually concluding that we had a plausible design that addressed the challenges.  The next step was to share the idea with the team and see if this was something worth pursuing.  Essentially, this is the Dragons Den moment where you pitch the idea and ask for investment but rather than directly asking for money you are asking the business to assign teams to help make the idea a reality. 

Now I would be lying if I was to say that we immediately got the green light.  As with many things in life, timing is crucial and at that time the business already had a healthy backlog of development commitments to meet.  But the feedback we received was positive and although the idea wouldn’t immediately be developed into a feature, we were encouraged to continue to incubate the idea further using the Creative Days and more people joined us to help do that.  This also provided us with an opportunity to file patent applications for the techniques we were employing.  A year or so later, teams were assigned, and it was time to bring the idea to life.  

So where does Las Vegas come into this?  Well each year HPE hosts an event called HPE Discover in Las Vegas.  This is where the company usually makes its big product announcements, and as part of the event there is also a vast exhibition hall where customers and HPE partners come and see the latest products and talk to the experts in their respective fields.  It was in one such exhibition hall that I stood ready to perform live demonstrations of the feature that not that long ago had been a simple question on a whiteboard.  And I can genuinely say that there is no better feeling than having customers explain to you how the feature you have designed will solve some of the challenges that they are facing. 



Andrew Todd
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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About the Author

Andrew_Todd

I initially joined HPE, or rather HP as it was back then, on a 13-month internship whilst studying for a degree in Computer and Network Engineering. The internship was with the Storage R&D team who supported and encouraged me to fully embrace the opportunity. They made it clear that I wasn’t there to make the tea’s or to do the work no one else wanted to do, but rather I was treated like any other member of the team and worked the same projects. After graduating university and a period working for a digital media start-up company, I rejoined HPE as an entry level engineer, once again working with the Storage R&D team.