Exciting Innovation

Over the Christmas period, I was invited to join up with the people I used to work with during the summer at IT Innovation for their post Christmas drinks in Southampton city centre. This gave me the opportunity to catch up with the developments on the projects that I worked on. For those unfamiliar with the work of IT Innovation, the organisation develops ideas from the University in partnership with industry. This was a good laugh as I had the opportunity to work on the AVATAR-m, which involved working with the BBC and a provider of large-scale hardware to develop software for the storage of audio/video data over multiple mediums on a grand scale. The key points to this software was both the ability to support planned migration from medium to medium, support for data replication to ensure data integrity and the ability to represent data spread over several different servers on different protocols as a singular volume.

My work involved preparation work for a demonstration at the IBC conference in Amsterdam. This involved all kinds of development work from PHP, Java to some low-level coding in C, setup and configuration of some seriously high-powered servers* using Linux. Once all that was done and dusted, work included migration of existing project servers to virtual servers with a minimal amount of configuration changes. I still talk about it with enthusiasm, so yeah, I’d recommend it.

I’ve previously worked in small towns and the centre of big cities, so the environment of a science park a few miles outside Southampton was a nice change. The location required that I needed my own form of transport and the local authorities have seen fit to provide a cycle path from the Avenue out to Chilworth, which was much appreciated and well used. At the time it was typical for a large minority of the staff to cycle in. In addition, there was a local pub and the science park had its own coffee shop which was straight down the corridor from IT Innovation’s offices. So generally a very pleasant working environment.

My thanks to Richard Lowe, Matthew Addis and Sue Jenkins for making me feel welcome and keeping me challenged whilst I was there.

* For the technically enthusiastic amongst you: these were 4 machines with Xeon processors, 8Gb RAM and 12TB local HDD space. These were rigged to a storage device containing 24TB of disk space separated into RAID10 and RAID5 volumes. The space of the storage device was 24TB after accounting for the RAID overhead. No, they wouldn’t allow me to take one of them home with me when I left, but I did get a bookcase…