So long Al, you were great

Al Shugart died this week - one of the brightest stars in the storage universe. Mike Cassidy's blog for the Mercury News does a nice job remembering him. Here's the url (link):

http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/cassidy/2006/12/13/al-shugart-dies-well-miss-the-genuine-article/

Shugart was replaced by Steve Luczo at Seagate in one of those cruel business turnabouts. Shugart brought Luczo in to help build a software business at Seagate through acquisition, which became a financial gambit in a larger plan of Luczo's. Its hard to argue with Luczo's vision and skill in taking Seagate private - probably not what Shugart envisioned, but a move that was every bit as brilliant as many of Shugart's had been over the years. Luczo was very impressive as Shugart's replacement but I've always felt he was a bit of a Brutus to Shugart's Julius Caesar.

Shugart's influence on the network storage industry was huge, but has been somewhat overlooked. IBM was getting ready to roll their Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) disk drives in the mid nineties, diminishing Seagate's influence in the enterprise disk drive business. Shugart and a team at Seagate went out to find a standards-based technology that they could use to compete with SSA and came across Fibre Channel. At the time FC was a floundering backbone network technology with a dim future due to the emergence of Gigabit Ethernet. The near miracle Seagate executed was building a consortium of companies that created a new, standard access method for Fibre Channel (FC-loop) that crushed IBM's SSA. As good as the technology feat was, the business creativity and leadership was way off the charts. Now I'm not much of an advocate for Fibre Channel anymore with iSCSI being so good, but its not obvious to me that SANs would have happened at all if not for FC-loop technology.

There is no question that Seagate's fortunes this decade would have been greatly diminished if not for their sizable high-margin FC disk business. IBM never really recovered from the loss and eventually sold its disk drive operations to Hitachi. Moreover, I don't think Luczo would have had the numbers to take Seagate private if the FC drive line hadn't been floating the company through an otherwise miserable cycle of chronic over-production.

Al Shugart was a true industry leader with a reach that was wide. Thanks, Al for your immense contributions to our industry and livelihoods. You really were the man.

Wii Redux - the thing runs on candle power

On the east coast for a business trip last week, I got a call from my despondent son. "Dad, the cat ate the wire from the sensor bar on my Wii."That really sucked, because the wire is super thin and although I told him I could fix it, I had my doubts about being able to solder the skinny little things together without screwing up the impedance and signal integrity in the wire. Considering how hard these things are to come by, I figured it would be almost impossible to get a replacement part any time soon.

When I started looking into the problem of a broken sensor bar, I found web sites discussing work arounds for the sensor bar - mostly from projection tv gamers who can't deal with the limited wire length (a shortcoming of the product - pun intended). The most interesting approach substituted a pair of candles for the sensor bar. This youtube video captured this setup working: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZxwBrCAtUE

I tried it myself and voila! it worked. My son was back in bliss, playing with a couple tea candles burning on the top of the TV like an altar decoration. Here's the deal. The sensor bar does not sense anything at all - instead it is a pair of infrared emitters (actually a pair of IR LED clusters). The Wii controller gets its location information from its position relative to those IR sources and then transmits that information to the console over its wireless connection. I made a couple sloppy solder joints to fix the wire and get power back to the sensor bar.

That's probably enough about gaming. I'll get back to storage now.