Storage Wars

Allen Samuels is a veteran of the storage industry, having worked for Citrix and Weitek before moving to Sandisk in 2013.

(Sandisk and Western Digital merged in March 2016). He’s on the advisory board member for Ceph—the open source distributed object store and file system that’s set to revolutionise storage as we know it. We caught up with him at LinuxCon in Berlin last December to discuss the technology, the ethos and, as high performance flash-based storage becomes ever more cheaper and reliable, whether or not we should consign all our spinning rust hard drives to the scrap heap.

Linux Format: So why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your career history: where you’ve come from, how you got to where you are?

Allen Samuels: How much about my history do you want to hear about?

LXF: Let’s go back to the very beginning…

AS: I graduated from college and went to work in the mainframe industry, as that’s where jobs were available at the time. I worked at Burroughs on their mainframe systems in California. I did that for a couple of years, I left Burroughs and joined Harris which were starting development of a 64-bit super mini computer. I worked on that for about four years and then moved to the Bay Area and joined this fabulous semiconductor startup called WayTek which did maths-intensive chips and graphics. I worked there for about 10 years and then started consulting. I did consulting for about another 10 years and then I started a wide area network optimisation company. I sold it to Citrix, then worked at Citrix for a couple of years, left there and started a cloud storage gateway company for several years. It didn’t work out too well. I fiddled around with some other things. And then I joined SanDisk about three years ago. Then we were bought by Western Digital.