Hi there,
I am Ulf Troppens. I start this blog to share insights of my investigation on BigData. As storage professional I am wondering about BigData and Hadoop. I support several customers who operate multi petabyte filesystems for years now. I read that some Hadoop installations are very big (multiple 100PB), though it seems that many current Hadoop installations are in the multiple 100TB range. Not really big. So, what is BigData all about? I hope that I will able to answer this question with my future blog posts.
There are already a plenty of blogs around BigData available. What makes my blog different?
1) My experience in storage. I am working in storage since 1997. The last one or two years I attended various meetings with storage and BigData professionals and observed that storage professionals typically do not understand BigData and that BigData professionals typically do not understand storage. I am curious to zoom with my “storage glasses” into the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and other storage related aspects of the Hadoop ecosystem.
2) My limited Java skills. I spent some personal time in 1996 and 1997 to learn Java and to experiment with design patterns (quite new at this time – the GoF book was published in 1994 and Java popped up in 1995). Since then I did nothing with Java or any other code development. Most of the Hadoop examples which I have found in the web are written in Java. This will be a challenge.
3) My fading Linux skills. I started on SunOS and was excited about Linux using Slackware 1.0 and a 0.99 kernel on my PC. I grew up with ksh, grep and awk and later on gained some skills in Perl and Python. Since 2005 I did sporadic hands-on on Linux or other Unix systems. A lot has changed since then. I plan to try Hadoop example code on my own Linux server. That will be another challenge.
4) My strong writing skills. I am author of the award winning books “Speichernetze” and “Storage Networks Explained”, one of the few technical books which have been translated from German to English and not the other way around. I am native German speaker but try to write in English. Though I hope that my experience with writing books helps me to create high quality blog posts.
I am excited about my upcoming excursion to BigData land and looking forward to get in touch with fellow travelers and BigData professionals.
In the next post I will introduce my travel guide.
Changes:
2016/08/26 – added link – “my travel guide” => BigData Investigation 2 – My Travel Guide: The Hadoop Book