Thread by @QuinnyPig

And now, a @netapp story from a misspent youth. It's thread time!

Tune in #AWSPSSUMMIT; you might enjoy this.

https://twitter.com/charleseblack/status/1138444575452946434

I used to be a grumpy UNIX sysadmin, also known as a UNIX sysadmin, since were were all grumpy.

I worked for a university. We had an old, out-of-warranty NetApp because new one costs money, and we were, again, a university.

A company called @Zerowait offered warranty service on this thing, and took a look at the monitoring outputs. Great company, would recommend.

So often a drive would fail or indicate it was going to fail, they'd overnight a hard drive to me, and the first I'd hear about it was an overnight box on my desk when I came back from lunch. Inside of every box was a Jelly Belly box of candy.

This incentivized the wrong behavior. I had a giant rubber hammer that I called the Jelly-Bean Hammer. People would look at me confused until they got the joke at which point their faces took on a look of abject horror.

Once, I was out to dinner with a student worker. I got paged by the NetApp. Then again by the NetApp. Then again by the NetApp. This was... uncommon, so we headed over to the datacenter.

We open the door and are greeted by a wall of heat. It seems the chiller had failed and it was now 90 degrees inside the datacenter.

The temperature sensor hadn't gone off because someone installed it directly in front of the cooling vent.

We got things back online, and were saved because the NetApp was a delicate flower which complained about its dainty feet being far too warm.

No complaints, this was a real problem. I always loved the NetApp filers, and WAFL remains my favorite filesystem.

Now getting limitless NFS, block, or object storage from a cloud provider is an API call away.

The world has moved on, and the road I walked to get here has long since been closed.

But I still remember @netapp's place in my origin story.