Last week, on January 31, two of my colleagues retired from IBM. At IBM, retirements always happen on the last day of the month.
- Mark Doumas
-
Mark Doumas retires after working 32 years with IBM. Mark was my manager for a few months in 2003. Back then, IBM was working on launching a variety of new products, including the IBM SAN File System (SFS), the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), a new release of Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), and TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC), which was later renamed to IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.
Mark was manager of the portfolio management team, and I was asked to manage the tape systems portfolio. I am no stranger to tape, as one of my 19 patents is for the pre-migration feature of the IBM 3494 Virtual Tape Server (VTS). The portfolio included LTO and Enterprise tape drives, tape libraries and virtual tape systems. My job was to help decide how much of IBM's money we should invest in each product area. This was less of a technical role, and more of a business-oriented project management position
Portfolio management is actually part of a chain of project management roles. At the lowest level are team leads that manage individual features, referred to as line items of a release. Release managers are responsible for all the line items of a particular release. Product managers determine which line items will be shipped in which release, and often have to balance across three or more releases. Architects help determine which products in a portfolio should have certain features. Since I was chief architect for DFSMS and Productivity Center, stepping up to portfolio manager was naturally the next rung on the career ladder.
(Side note: If you were wondering why I was only a few months on the job, it was because I was offered an even better position as Technical Evangelist for SVC. See my 2007 blog post [The Art of Evangelism] for a humourous glimpse of the kind of trouble I got in with that title on my business card!)
While my stint in this role was brief, I am still considered an honorary member of the tape development team. Nearly every week I present an overview of our tape systems portfolio at the Tucson Executive Briefing Center, or on the road at conferences and marketing events.
This year, 2012, marks the 60th anniversary of IBM Tape, but I will save that for a future post!
- Jim Rymarczyk
-
Jim is an IBM Fellow for IBM Systems and Technology Group. There are only 73 IBM Fellows currently working for IBM, and this is the highest honor IBM can bestow on an employee. He has been working with IBM since 1968 and now retires after 44 years! Jim was tasked with predicting the future of IT, and help drive strategic direction for IBM. Cost pressures, requirements for growth, accelerating innovation and changing business needs help influence this direction.
Jim was one of our keynote speakers at the IBM System Storage and System x Technical University last July. You can read my summary of his keynote address on my blog post [2011 IBM Storage University - More Keynotes]. Here is a quick [2-minute YouTube video] of Jim shortly after he gave his keynote address.
Many consider Jim one of the fathers of server virtualization. For those who think VMware invented the concept of running multiple operating systems on a single host machine, guess again! IBM developed the first server hypervisor in 1967, and introduced the industry's first [offical VM product on August 2, 1972] for the mainframe.
When I joined IBM in 1986, my first job was to work on what was then called DFHSM software for the MVS operating system. Each software engineer had unlimited access to his or her own VM instance of a mainframe for development and testing. This was way better than what we had in college, having to share time on systems for only a few minutes or hours per day. Today, DFHSM is now called the DFSMShsm component of DFSMS, an element of the z/OS operating system.
At various conferences like [SHARE] and [WAVV] we celebrated VM's 25th anniversary in 1997, and its 30th anniversary in 2002. Today, it is called z/VM and IBM continues to invest in its future. Last October, IBM announced [z/VM 6.2] release which provides Live Guest Relocation (LGR) to seemlessly move VM guest images from one mainframe to another, similar to PowerVM's Live Partition Mobility or VMware's VMotion.
Lately, it seems employees at other companies jump from job to job, and from employer to employer, on average every 4.1 years. According to [National Longitudinal Surveys] conducted by the [US. Government's Bureau of Labor Statistics], the average baby boomer holds 11 jobs. In contrast, it is quite common to see IBMers work the majority of their career at IBM.
The next time you have a tasty beverage in your hand, raise your glass! To Mark and Jim, you have earned our respect, and you both have certainly earned your retirement!
technorati tags: virtualization, , hypervisor, Mark Doumas, tape, SONAS, z/vm, ibm