Industry Solutions

My Story

So how do we think? About innovation? About Cleversafe? And what are little known facts about us? Learn more about us through My Story profiles.

 

Joseph's Story

What technology, business, or product has really wowed, surprised, or delighted you lately? Why?

The Apple iPhone and iPad. While I am not a loyal Apple follower, what they have been able to do with the iPhone and iPad in providing their customers with the products they want is truly remarkable!

 

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Explain why and what you learned from it.

Working in conjunction with a Cleversafe customer building 10 PB+, and enabling our software to run on their hardware platform.

 

What contributes to you being innovative?

My first employer when I was in high school taught me to always look for the problems in the world and think of ways that you can solve them.

 

And how do you define innovation?

Seeing a problem and finding a way to solve it.

 

So Cleversafe. What is it about this company that you love?

The new technology that is being created and being able to take part of this new technology. People often look for things that change the way a segment goes and I am currently working on that.

 

What do you predict for Cleversafe’s future?

Cleversafe will be the Google and Apple of the storage industry. The very talented people within the company are forward thinking and have laid the ground work for the more traditional storage companies to have to play catch up.

 

What’s your favorite thing about working at Cleversafe?

The ability to work on new things every quarter, which keeps me technically sharp.

 

And, please tell us a little known fact about yourself.

My first time driving in England, I kept on putting my right arm out to shift the gear. It was hard for me to get used to shifting gears with my left hand. Also, I got stuck on my first round about and I went around several times just like the Clark Griswold in European Vacation.

Sarah's Story

What technology, business, or product has really wowed, surprised, or delighted you lately? Why?

It has nothing to do with storage but the Sony Nex-5 camera. I wanted to learn more about photography without having to carry a huge SLR. Sony was able to mix the size and weight of a basic digital camera with the advanced functionality and quality of an SLR. Also they created a menu so easy to use full of tips and guidance that I could start playing with it right away.

 

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Explain why and what you learned from it.

The favorite project I worked on was back in Engineering school in France. With the school computer science club we have gathered 250 computers from companies that we fixed, cleaned, re-imaged, shipped and distributed to 73 non-profit organizations throughout Morocco: my home country. For companies it was a way to recycle their office computers for a great cause and for the non-profit organizations it was a chance to modernize and help their villages. It was amazing to see smiles on children faces as we were delivering the computers!

This project was a great opportunity for me to learn about logistics, about re-using and recycling to be greener, about different regulations around licensing, shipping and customs and about leveraging contacts and connections.

 

What contributes to you being innovative?

I had the chance to grow up in Morocco, study in France and work in the United States. Being exposed to so many different cultures and traditions really opened my mind.

 

And how do you define innovation?

Coming up with simple ideas to improve what already exists.

 

So Cleversafe. What is it about this company that you love?

Cleversafe is an amazing environment where employees are really empowered to make a difference. Everyone is listened to and invited to bring ideas and implement them.

 

What do you predict for Cleversafe’s future?

I have always believed that once Cleversafe breaks through it will be the biggest revolution in storage and will become the leading example.

 

What’s your favorite thing about working at Cleversafe?

My favorite thing about Cleversafe is working in a company full of smart, young and dynamic engineers.

 

And what cool concept have you been working on at Cleversafe?

One cool challenge I am involved with at Cleversafe since the very beginning is the introduction and enforcement of processes and quality in this fast pace environment. From adapting new methodologies such as Scrum, to introducing build quality criteria or moving from traditional testing to continuous testing, it is very interesting to think about ways to introduce new behaviors without adding too much overhead on engineers.

 

And, please tell us a little known fact about yourself.

After High school and before Engineering school, I did one year of medical school. As part of the 1st week of class, there is a sort of hazing period where the older students take the newbies out to do all sort of things. This was in Strasbourg (a city North East of France). I had to sing in the street at the entrance of the Notre Dame Cathedral (main tourist attraction) the med school anthem which is as you can imagine full of bad words… ;-)

Chad's Story

What technology, business, or product has really wowed, surprised, or delighted you lately? Why?

Commvault’s Simpana family is the latest set of products that focus on backup and disaster recovery solutions with a strong integration with VMware. Commvault has also integrated advanced de-duplication at both the source and target-side.

A technology that I’ve been following for over a year now and is finally receiving the attention it deserves is the CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface) standard which was designed to ensure data can be easily migrated between Cloud service providers. This has the potential to provide customers with all of the cost benefits of the cloud without getting trapped in vendor lock-in.

 

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Explain why and what you learned from it.

I think that the most interesting and ambitious project/product I’ve had the satisfaction of leading is Compellent’s introduction of solid state disk drives as Tier 0 within their tiered storage SAN—introducing a level of performance not previously achievable with rotating drives. What was most satisfying about this project was that customers adopted the technology more readily than anyone expected and more importantly, were able to actually demonstrate the performance improvements.

 

What contributes to you being innovative?

I believe that the most significant contributor to my innovativeness is my engineering approach which is deeply ingrained in me beyond my formal schooling. Growing up the son of an electrical engineer who spent a majority of his career at Control Data, I have always been intrigued by mechanical and electrical things—whether it is a piece of stereo equipment or the engine of a car. I enjoy most working with both our customers and our Development organization to determine truly innovative ways of enhancing and improving storage technologies.

 

And how do you define innovation?

I define innovation as “the ability to create something both new AND useful to the end user, without regard to existing standards or conventional perception”.

 

So Cleversafe. What is it about this company that you love?

I absolutely love the creativity, drive and determination exhibited by each and every person working at Cleversafe. The culture is truly reflective of a “highly innovative technology company” and is what I imagine Google’s culture was like back in the beginning years.

 

What do you predict for Cleversafe’s future?

Cleversafe has already attracted some very prestigious, high profile companies as customers and I believe that more and more companies will join the movement to use Cleversafe’s efficient object storage platform in place of traditional RAID and replicated storage systems. And because companies’ storage requirements continue to increase (in many cases exponentially year-over-year), I believe that Cleversafe’s ability to infinitely scale will continue to transform the storage industry—similar to how solid state disk drives and automated tiering have transformed the SAN market.

 

What’s your favorite thing about working at Cleversafe?

What I enjoy most about working at Cleversafe is the collaboration that occurs within the company and amongst the different departments. I have the pleasure of working closely with both Sales and Development and consequently, get to experience the customer’s reaction to our products, as well as, engage with our engineers on the latest technologies.

 

And what cool concept have you been working on at Cleversafe?

Cleversafe is in the process of developing the ability for our appliances to work within a “virtual machine” environment and we expect that this will open up tremendous opportunities both for Cleversafe and also for our customers. By using “virtual machines” for our appliances, customers will have the ability to leverage their existing IT infrastructure—further reducing their storage expenditures.

 

And, please tell us a little known fact about yourself.

If you saw me in person, you may be able to discern this; I used to have an earring (in my left ear). I got the earring in my senior year of high school, right before our spring break trip to Cancun, Mexico. And as much as I have tried to get the hole to close up, I can still easily place an earring back in—something my kids get a real kick out of (especially when I put in one of my daughters really obnoxious earrings).

Dan's Story

What technology, business, or product has really wowed, surprised, or delighted you lately? Why?

The ability to store 3 TB on a disk drive still blows me away. When I started in the storage industry 16 years ago my first project was a 400GB 2000LB Array that cost more than $500,000. Today our phones have more storage.

 

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Explain why and what you learned from it.

One of my favorite projects was working with a Satellite imagery company and helping them store and distribute the images used for GPS, government agencies and mapping companies. Actually seeing how the process worked from the Satellite down to the ground stations through to the end-user.

 

What contributes to you being innovative?

My innovative drive comes from my competitiveness, and desire to be better at solving customer problems than any of my competitors.

 

And how do you define innovation?

The ability to re-invent and solve problems in a unique way.

 

So Cleversafe. What is it about this company that you love?

The people. Everyone, and I mean everyone has the attitude “how can I help”. We really have a positive can get it done attitude.

 

What do you predict for Cleversafe’s future?

Storage is a problem for businesses that is not going away. We solve this problem so uniquely that I have no doubt we will be wildly successful. Whether we IPO or are acquired by a larger company, we are solving the right problem at the right time.

 

What’s your favorite thing about working at Cleversafe?

The versatility to get things done.

 

And what cool concept have you been working on at Cleversafe?

The challenge I am working on is scaling to support our customer demand. Both through direct and in-direct channels.

 

And, please tell us a little known fact about yourself.

I have traveled all over the world - I have been to every state in the US and every continent in the world, except Antartica.