I began my "IT career" in early 2000 as a temp employee for for an "un-named" tire manufacturer that recalled a bunch-o-tires. My responsibilities began with data entry and 18 months later I had the "honor" of running the claim center that processed all 6 million free tires :-) This was where I discovered the joy that is data analysis while crunching numbers and generating reports for the CxO's and federal judges. This also happened to be where I learned that MS Access has it's limitations ... LOL !

My daily drive to the "un-named tire company" brought be passed Dell's Nashville call center every day for 18 months.
"hmmm...that'd be a cool place to work..." and once that tire recall had "ended" my IT career moved on to Dell. In December of 2001 my first role at dell was as a sales rep in our Nashville call center answering ~26,000 calls from consumers responding to "Dude!" ads over three and a half years :-)

I've since moved around to various sales and operations roles including:

• Six months with our Global Call Center Operatons folks (lots-o-reporting and data analysis!)
• About a year taking calls from small business customers (no "dude" calls but lots of "what's a server" conversations).

Eventually I landed in Dell's Advanced Systems Group. My role within "ASG" for the past 3 years has been, and continues to be known as a "Technical Solutions Representative" (aka TSR). So I'm the guy your account manager grabs to help explain the topics such as those discussed on this wiki.

Due to a high customer demand I've come to learn a great dea about storage and server consolidation via technologies such as SAN storage and virtualization. After architecting several dozen virtual infrastructures for both small and large environments I've became a big fan of VMware and iSCSI. I'm now looking forward to see how iSCSI will play with 10Gb ethernet and other SAN fabric optons such as FCoE. We'll I digress before te geek-shpeak goes to far.

Here's a pic of what yet get when you consolidate 26 server using VMware and consolidate 30+TB of data using SAN storage :-)



--Brian Summers