Resume Details:

10/1999 - 8/2000: Legato, Dublin, CA:

Hired into Legato as Serverless Backup/Restore Software engineering manager reporting to director for all "serverless" backup and restore software development.

Legato sells a full-featured multiplatform compliant backup and restore supporting multiple popular data bases and business applications (i.e. Oracle, SAP, Veritas, etc.). When I started, Legato was 10 years old and had a significant percentage of the backup/restore market, including 65,000 customer licenses. It was in the process of adding "serverless" backup/restore features to it's basic product line including SAN support. In this case serverless BR means that the application server doesn't need to supply resources to transfer the data base content to the backup device (disk to tape). This is possible because other devices are dedicated to effecting the transfer while the application server is active, and Legato installs driver level modifications that collect and save any data base "changes" to the data base effected through the server during the backup process (the technology is proprietary).

The basic data transfer technology depended on an initial analysis of the "location" of transferrable data block by Legato analysis software in the application server that understood the data base and the application that "owned" the data. This information along with the backup choices were supplied to the backup device which then proceeded to move the data to the tape device. There were two basic configurations that make this possible, in the non-SAN, original configuration the backup server is attached through a second port to the data devices that the application server is using. The backup server can access the data devices at the same time as the app server and moves data to an attached tape device. The SAN configuration has all disk and tape devices attached to the fiberoptic/copper SAN via smart switches that can be told to move data between the disk and tape devices. These smart switches generally use a standard communications protocol for commands necessary to retrieve and store date on the attached data devices. The switches were controlled from Legato supplied software on the App server.

My group was responsible for implementing the basic data transfer software technology for these "serverless" solutions. The team grew over the few months from 4 to 7 engineers. They worked on Sun Workstation using a generic (GNU) C compiler using a very vanilla set of C instructions that generally compiled across a wide range of hardware and software platforms. OS"s supported included Windows variants and UNIX variants (across many hardware platforms). The projects we worked on took generally 4 to 6 months and went through a very rigorous software development process including a significant QA regression test.

Legato's "integration" process included a nightly build of the complete product line, including any new code committed to the code base during the day. They had a significant build watch process in place to "correct" mistakes in the code base in a timely fashion. They also had a source control architecture to allow more than 100 engineers to work on the same code base in a variety of different areas (new features, OS support, App support, bug fixes...) from a variety of labs in 3 countries. The coordination effort was significant and very important. Members of the team had visibility to some of the original Legato founders (both for doing things right and wrong) due to the level of coordination necessary.

The team's job (and my responsibility) at Legato was to deliver the SAN project on time and to address any feature changes or bug fixes in the currently released product. There were 3 senior engineers and several junior engineers on the staff.

My Responsibilities while at Legato:

Typical administration duties:

• Hire/fire/performance reviews/provide constructive feedback
• Encourage effort and growth of engineers
• Make project asssignments
• Review and make regular status reports
• Continue to improve technical/management skills
• Work with India based technology team to coordinate maintenance and handoff
• Acquire assets (software and hardware) needed for software development

Make sure project can be and is delivered on time with quality:

• Validate requirements meet business needs and adequately define what's needed
• Provide task breakdown with resources defined and timing
• Adjust other assignments to meet project priorities
• Assess and report progress and effort being applied to project
• Make sure the necessary level of effort is applied to meet the feature, quality and time requirements
• Keep Project management, Quality Assurance and other software development management informed of progress
• Assure proper software development processes are followed

Ensure good Software development process for all projects that require Java programming;

• Enforce process steps, requirements, specs, design, code, test, maintenance
• Work with product/project managers to document requirements for projects and guestimate implementation times/dates, work up any tradeoffs and risk definitions.
• Guide Software engineers in requirements definition and good design solutions,
• Draw up planning docs (MS Project, Excel etc.), work with engineers to validate task times and resources,
• Review/contribute to engineering response and design documents,
• Work with engineers on resolving difficult implementation problems, providing liason with project mgmt if requirements need to be reset,
• Review Unit Test Plan and observe execution of unit tests with engineer(s) prior to integration
• Review integration plan and observe integration testing with engineers prior to hand off to QA

Participate in improving the health and effectiveness of the technology department;

• Get engineers trained in new technologies as they become "viable" for consideration
• Participate in design/technology discussions with design teams
• work with project management to understand future application projects
• Work with other Dev Labs, release management, Project management and QA engineering groups to improve working relationships and interfaces

Technologies used:

• Typical Microsoft Office suite, plus MS Project
• GNU C compiler
• Server OS: Solaris,
• Fiber Channel Switches; Crossroads, Brocade, Pathlight, Gadzooks,
• Fiber Channel Controllers; Emulex, JNI, Finisar,...