Xyratex is a leading provider of data storage technology, including modular solutions for the enterprise data storage industry and hard disk drive (HDD) capital equipment for the HDD industry. Xyratex enterprise data storage platforms provide a range of advanced, scalable data storage solutions for the Original Equipment Manufacturer and High Performance Computing communities. As the largest capital equipment supplier to the industry, Xyratex HDD capital equipment enables disk drive manufacturers and their component suppliers to meet today’s technology and productivity requirements. Xyratex has over 25 years of experience in research and development relating to disk drives, storage systems and manufacturing process technology.

Summary:

Xyratex has established ClusterStor as a new business line to focus on the HPC /Big Data marketplace. The Clusterstor product line leverages the core competencies of Xyratex in leading edge enterprise class storage system design, scalable file systems, data protection, Linux based operating systems and comprehensive system management to develop innovative new storage solutions that address the needs of this high growth market.

The Product Manager --is a key member of the Business Line Management team and responsible for Xyratex's ClusterStor HPC storage software product line. This role will support the Director of Product Management in gathering marketing requirements, provide industry insights, and drive software product direction within the company. The Product Manager will work individually and as part of a dynamic team that is building this business through increasing the adoption of current products, developing a compelling roadmap, entering new market segments and partnerships.

This position requires managing deliverables across cross-functional teams and offers an excellent opportunity for a dynamic and results-oriented individual to make significant contributions to Xyratex ClusterStor expanding market presence and industry leadership.

Essential Job Functions and Responsibilities:

• Proactively works with all stakeholders to understand market and technology trends, customer requirements to develop a software release roadmap that will ensure the competitiveness of Clusterstor solutions overtime.
• Defines, creates, communicates, and maintains the ‘Marketing Requirements Document’ that maps customers needs/use cases to product requirements.
• Engages with stakeholders, including business development and customers, as the subject matter expert on the Clusterstor solutions and the HPC market.
• Managing day-to-day product life cycle management including interaction with senior management or executive levels on matters concerning several functional areas, divisions, and/or customers.
• Meet regularly with Development teams to prioritize new feature requirements and software release priorities as part of an agile software development team.
• Works with industry analysts and partners to stay appraised of market requirements. Follow industry transitions and customer/competitor alignment to these transitions.
• Build collaborative relationships on multiple organizational levels with managers, partners, and peers from diverse backgrounds across functional lines.
• Develop marketing assets that support sales through all appropriate channels.
• Assures adherence to technical product, schedules and cost requirements
• Analyzes critical financial information in order to provide business metrics on the performance achieved for the product by working with the finance organization
• Performs other job-related duties and responsibilities as may be assigned from time to time.
  

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Technical: must be technically strong, familiar with storage related technologies including Clustered File Systems, able to understand complex architectures from overall system design to installation and be equally comfortable communicating technical features to either customers or internal developers/architects.
• Industry: knowledge of the HPC Industry and storage competitive landscape; understand the HPC market and technology ecosystem.
• Development: must have experience in agile software development processes such as scrum or TSP.
• Entrepreneurial vision and drive: must be proactive in identifying opportunities and challenges with the ability to work with others to develop and execute successful plans to address*.*
• Communication: must exemplify effective verbal, written, and interpersonal skills.
• Management: must be able to lead cross-functional teams, prioritize multiple tasks, manage conflicting deadlines, and work effectively in a challenging dynamic environment.

Education and Experience:

Required Experience

• Experience: 5+ years of industry experience with software product management or development in which experiences with strategy development, product definition, positioning, and partnership development were acquired.
  

Desired Experience

• 5+ years product management of storage appliance products
• Demonstrate subject matter expertise in storage solutions.
• Proven track record creating detailed use cases and software requirements for complex file system and data storage features
• Product Management, System Engineering or Architecture experience with scale-out storage file systems

Required Education

• Bachelors degree in Marketing or Engineering or equivalent is required
  

Desired Education

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science preferred.
• Post Graduate degree desired.
  

Mental Requirements:

• Organizing and coordinating schedules
• Analyzing and interpreting data
• Strategy development
• Problem-solving
• Communicating with the public
• Creating written documentation
  

Physical Requirements:

• Sitting for extended periods of time
• Standing for moderate periods of time
• Lifting up to 40 pounds occasionally
  

Environmental Conditions:

• Standard office conditions
  

Travel Requirements:

• Up to 40%- domestic and international travel, at times on short notice.
• Current passport and no history of declined visas, or entry refusal to any country.

 Please apply at http://www.xyratex.com/company/employment/jobdetails.aspx?jobid=695 

Xyratex International understands the advantages in creating a diverse workforce and the importance of equal employment opportunity. We are an equal opportunity employer. We are an E-Verify employer.

 Job is located  Fremont, CA

I've spent a while this morning looking for the markup for Gerrit comments.

It seems that this isn't a well documented markup, so I'm posting a record of my discovery here!

http://review.whamcloud.com is used to help the code review workflow at Whamcloud. I find this to be an excellent tool. One feature I like is you can make individual in-line comments against specific lines of a change-set.

This is really handy to explain what needs to change - and why I have (reluctantly) given a -1 score.

So, If you find yourself doing similar, you may want to include a formatted comment. Up until now, I didn't know how. That all changed when I found a helpful thread on groups.google.com.

The thread helpfully explains you can (at least) use (undocumented) markup to do the following:

* item a
* item 1
* item

# item a
# item 1
# item

 paragraph starting
with a space
 preserves
formatting

 paragraph starting
with a space
 preserves
formatting

I'm doing a lot of technical reviewing at the moment.

I'm collecting some notes here to share the guidelines I use when writing. These may be helpful if you ever wish to understand what principles I've applied to reviewing your document (if ever you should want me to review something!)

• Write in the third person: don't use 'I' 'we', 'they' etc. I feel like this makes document feel authoritative - while allowing the individual author to deny responsibility for his work.
• Adjectives should be used very sparingly. They are, in my experience, despised in the UK. US readers my have a little more sympathy.
• If a number is less than ten, write it. Otherwise use digits.
• Ensure every paragraph has a minimum of three sentences.
• Never have a sentence of over 25 words.
• Always jump at the chance to put a picture or figure in. Contrive a chance if necessary.
• If you have to describe a person in your document use 'she' not 'he'. I sometimes don't have courage to do this, but I think it is a good choice.
• Don't use apostrophized truncations of two words. Like "it's" for "it is".
• Don't use verbized nouns. Like 'diarized'.

There are tools to measure metrics for your text - Emacs may have one built in?

And while I'm on the topic of tools - and writing - ItsAllText for Firefox is excellent.

NOTE: If these guidlines are a reflection of my personality, I would probably be described as: dry, formal academic, plodding.

Last week, I made a request to begin a project milestone to a committee (the OpenSFS Project Advisory Committee). One of the diligent members of the committee jumped onto the wiki where I had been drafting the Scope Statement for the project and raised a number of serious concerns about this document.

Among the claims of the Scope Statement were a wildly inaccurate completion date and imprecise claim on scope. As the PM - and responsible for the Scope Statement - addressing these issues was time-consuming and a minor embarrassment. Developing a project with a committee and on a wiki presents some interesting challenges for me and this blog post is about recording the challenges and leanings from this particular incident.

Observations

This episode had a positive outcome.

While I may have suffered some minor embarrassment - having early critical engagement with the scope document is extremely valuable. The PAC, Andreas, Bryon and Di rapidly rallied around to get a clarification of the areas of concern. The result is that uncertainty has been reduced and the document is well read.

This episode had a cost.

This incident triggered flurry of internal and external email correspondence. The architect and the engineer were repeatedly interrupted resolving this issue. Unplanned interruptions are costly. An additional cost is to the confidence of the PAC with Whamcloud. The PM has a primary role in maintain this relationship and in that role, I have identified some simple changes to enhance our ability to avoid similar issues in the future.

Changes

Scheduled release.

The OpenSFS work has an interesting requirement that beginning milestones must be agreed. In order to keep ourselves busy, we assume some risk and begin some work early. I began scope statements on the wiki. In this case I drafted a scope statement a month ago, and left it to gather dust. While early, frank dialog is valuable, inaccurate claims are distracting. To ensure that a accurate document is available to OpenSFS, the architects and engineers should be aware of the document first, and the schedule of start and delivery.

Annotating document phases.

Previously, when you visit the wiki pages, it is not clear what phase a document is in. Jira provides some handy markup that I will begin to attach to the top of all relevant wiki pages.

Last week was the first user organized Lustre User Group (LUG) event.  It was a shining success and I offer kudos to those putting it on.  As a committee member for the SC (formerly Super Computing) conference series, I realize it is a huge amount of work to take on and doing it in your spare time takes a large commitment.  Congratulations to the team that pulled it off.

This event really brought out the shine in Lustre (sorry - couldn't resist).  If you simply count the number of companies in attendance - it was up 50% from the past year.  Clearly there is a lot of interest in this technology.  A year ago, there was one source for Lustre and the future was difficult to see.  Today you can get at the technology (from the same tree) from a number of quality sources and the community agrees there is building momentum for a strong future.  It was particularly encouraging to see a strong show of presence from the storage and compute vendors, who are part of the Lustre community.

Whamcloud was there in force, presenting nine times over the three day event.  Our dedication to vendor neutral Lustre is genuine and clearly present in each talk given by our people.  Whamcloud employees traveled to Orlando from France, Canada, China, the UK (and of course the US).  All the talks were well received - I received a number of positive comments on the materials.

The highlight of the event is undoubtedly the joining of the two US-based community groups: HPCFS and the OpenSFS.  Moving forward, they will be known as the OpenSFS community group.  This act underscores the reality that the community is not forking the tree - it is acting as one.  The European Open File System group is an active participant in these activities and their contributions are welcome.

Finally, the 2.1 release update.  This was the first talk, by Peter Jones of Whamcloud.  Much to the delight of the audience, Peter announced that the 2.1 release is on schedule for summer.  The community help with this release is welcome and I invite anyone interested in helping to join the weekly call on Tuesday at 9:30am Pacific 866-914-3976 passcode: 534986#

Livermore National Laboratory has a position open for a Parallel File System Administrator on my team, and I thought this would be a good forum to notify interested parties.  You can find this position at https://careers.llnl.gov/ and search for job 9839.  Here is the brief description:

NATURE AND SCOPE OF JOB
As a member of the Livermore Computing (LC) supercomputer center will work as a parallel file systems administrator supporting LC's Lustre file systems. The working environment is challenging and team-oriented. LC is one of the largest supercomputer centers in the world whose resources include several of the world's largest IBM clusters (Dawn, Blue Gene/L) as well as other very large Linux clusters from Dell and Appro. Supporting these supercomputer are numerous fast multi-petabyte Lustre file systems comprised of linux servers and high performance RAID arrays, all connected to an expansive heterogeneous network. This position will focus on administration of the Lustre file systems, but will also have assignments and tasks that require familiarity with the supercomputer clusters.  This position requires the ability to serve periodically on a rotating off-hours call list. Will report to the System Administration Group Leader.

I'm at the LUG this week (4/12-4/14) and would be happy to talk to anyone interested.  Please contact me in person or via email if you would like to chat.

Thanks,

-Marc

----
D. Marc Stearman
Lustre Operations Lead
marc@llnl.gov
925.423.9670
Pager: 1.888.203.0641