VERITAS

When I was on the NFS project at Tandem, I was the team lead for the file-system portion and Marc Desgrousillier was in charge of the communication interface. Our teams worked closely together.

 

During the period that I was off work, Marc sent a message to an email list for former Tandem employees. I wrote to him and he told me that he was now a director at VERITAS. I told him that I had tried several times to get my foot in the door at VERITAS, always without success. He wrote back to say that he had no development openings, but he did have an opening in QA (Quality Assurance). I told him I was also pursuing QA positions. He put me in contact with the QA manager, and after a long difficult interview process I was offered a position. My job was to write tools and make other improvements in the software infrastructure that QA uses.

 

I worked at VERITAS for about four years. During that time, VERITAS was acquired by Symantec. That aquisition changed some benefits and culture, but the work itself remained the same.

 

The product I work on is the Volume Manager. Originally an OS would install a file system on a disk drive. Then as disks got larger, they were divided into partitions, and file systems would be installed in a partition, which might be thought of as a virtual disk. The Volume Manager extends that “virtual disk” concept further, making it possible to have a “volume” (VERITAS’s name for a virtual disk). A volume may be a portion of a physical disk (in the same fashion as a partition) or it may span multiple disks. It may be made more fault tolerant using mirroring, striping or RAID5. In this aspect, the Volume Manager shares concepts from the Tandem architecture (which uses mirroring for disk fault tolerance). But whereas I had considered the Sun Cluster to be a pale imitation of the Tandem software, the VERITAS Volume Manger (at least in its realm of disk management) has surpassed the Tandem software’s features and capabilities.

 

The VERITAS Volume Manager runs on three flavors of UNIX: Solaris (Sun), HP-UX (HP), and AIX (IBM). Additionally we run on Linux. There is also a Windows version of Volume Manager, but that is done in a separate group.

 

At VERITAS I was back in an individual office. I had two computers in my office: A Sun workstation (which I used as a test server) and a Dell laptop, running Windows 2000. Many of my co-workers were Microsoft haters and did all their work from their Sun workstation. But I liked the Windows tools and I came to find that by working on the PC and using telnet to connect to our lab machines, and even to my office Sun machine, it was a very nice hybrid environment. As at MS2 I could use a PVN to connect to the VERITAS network from home.

 

Unfortunately VERITAS's business declined anlong with those of Sun Mircosystem, which was the computer system that VERITAS products started on and which continued t be a significant portion of their customer base. So, in December of of 2006, the entire development and QA team was moved to India, where salaries are cheaper. Some people on my team transfered to other VERITAS products; others were laid off. I was the only person left. But my new role didn't apeal to me and so when I was recruited by VMWare I jumped at the chance.