Storage & Infrastructure Engineering
I run object storage at petabyte scale, and I write down what I find when I take it apart. Evidence over reputation — in both directions.
Twenty-six years in enterprise infrastructure, most of it spent where storage meets everything else — the network, the directory, the certificate estate, the monitoring stack, and the people who have to keep all of it running at three in the morning. My current work is object storage: designing it, deploying it, and being the person called when a platform behaves in ways its documentation does not describe.
That last part is most of the job. Vendor documentation tells you what a product does. It rarely tells you what happens when a single storage process crashes at two in the morning and takes a node with it, or why a packet capture on port 443 comes back empty. Answering those questions means reading the installer image, the supervision tree, and the source — and then writing it down so the next engineer does not have to.
Sole storage subject matter expert embedded with a federal financial services client, responsible for a 40+ petabyte object storage estate across eight sites. Day to day: platform architecture and deployment, critical situation response, root cause analysis, and the observability layer that watches all of it.
Earlier engagements across the practice covered financial services, federal and defense, law enforcement, media, healthcare and retail — including Walmart, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Christie's, Standard Chartered Bank, Charter Communications, Disney, Northrop Grumman, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, STARZ and Merck.
Full-stack rebuild of the platform and the infrastructure under it. The stretch where I learned systems from the application down rather than the rack up — which is still how I read a storage problem.
Oracle Certified Professional (10g, 11g, 12c) · Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (NT4 through 2008) · CompTIA Linux+, Network+, Project+
Technical work that ended up being worth publishing. Each one is a single self-contained page — no trackers, no third-party requests, nothing loaded from anywhere but the server it sits on.
Hitachi Content Platform — An Authoritative Architecture Reference
What the product documentation leaves out: the Argus supervision model, the RIS storage engine, the JVM component graph, the real port surface behind the NAT redirects, and the authentication matrix. Derived from static analysis of the installer image.
hcp.noellucas.io
Will It Still Be Here in Ten Years?
Open-core storage vendors have a pattern: build an audience on a permissive license, then move the useful parts behind a commercial edge. A vendor-neutral look at how to test a platform for longevity before you commit a decade of data to it.
longevity.noellucas.io
Bit Rot Is Real — And Here Is the Evidence
A single flipped bit in a Java class file on a production storage node, caught by checksum mismatch against its redundant twin. The forensic trail, anonymized, plus a live demonstration of why one changed bit destroys an entire hash.
bitrot.noellucas.io