Weener Works….

Mike Workman, CEO of Ellison's Pillar Data Systems, is as much a lunatic as I previously mentioned. Check this article out in Forbes - Article

If you don't feel like reading it, allow me to paraphrase: Mike blows things up. He makes fireworks, bought "Weener Works" – which is some land in a desolate area of an Arizona desert – so he could go make heavy explosives and watch them blow up. How cool is that?

As a male, I'm also stricken with bizarre fascinations with cars, big trucks, and blowing things up. I buy silly cars. Mike makes bombs. I think I'm saner but who's to judge?

Funny thing is, in real life, while he can certainly be volatile, for the most part Mike is about as serene and passive as one can be. He listens, thinks, and listens some more. Maybe going to the desert and blowing things up keeps him from doing so in a staff meeting. It might be good therapy.

Speaking of blowing things up, I had one of the more interesting – and only outdoor – briefing of my illustrious career recently. ioSafe is a California company who builds fireproof/flood proof packaging for disk drives and systems. They showed up with an oven connected to enough propane to make Mike Workman happy, and proceeded to take a normal 3.5" disk and one of their magically packaged disks, copy some photo files onto them (mostly of Brian Garrett who you just can't fake photographically!), and blow them up. They got the thing up to 1100 degrees (they wanted 1500 but the New England wind was blowing) and cooked the disks to death. They then dumped the magic disk into water, seeing how if your computer room blows up eventually you'll need water to put it out.

It's pretty cool stuff. This package costs about $300 bucks (with a 2.5" drive) and when it gets hot, gaskets swell up to seal the disk off as it shuts down to keep flames and eventual water out of it. After the wreckage, you take the disk, send it back to ioSafe, and they rip off the enclosure (the SN of the disk is stamped into the metal, as paper labels would be toasted), pull out the insulation, and plug the disk into a reader. I saw it work in 3 minutes. For a small company who doesn't do any disaster recovery, buying/building an array using this technology might add $1000-$1500 bucks to the cost of the storage – but what piece of mind! They make bigger self-enclosed systems (NAS and USB) for mid-market plays, but why wouldn't even big shops want this? For a pretty paltry sum you can add a whole new layer of insurance to the game.

So now when Mike comes to blow things up, you might lose a limb but you won't lose any data…….