About

About Dirty Cache by Bart Sjerps

At DellEMC – a company with a history in data storage – we sometimes tend to forget why we are all so busy making great infrastructure solutions for our customers.

This blog is dedicated to the most important parts of the IT environment – the Business Applications – and how they interact with storage infrastructure.

About the name of this blog

In computer engineering, a cache is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster.

Dirty Cache refers to data which has not yet been committed to the database (or disk), and is currently held in computer memory. In relation with computer storage,  cache is at the borderline between application logic (such as a database) and physical storage components.

In my experience, “Dirty Cache” also is analogue to how the average application often behaves (or often rather misbehaves) on a storage infrastructure.

The name Dirty Cache was vaguely inspired by the song “Dirty Cash (Money Talks)” by Stevie V. in 1990 (watch on Youtube). The song was a protest against materialism and talks about being addicted to money like a junkie.

Sometimes our customers spend lots of dirty cash to solve application problems, and I regard it as my (and DellEMC’s) mission to do more with less – by using intelligent infrastructure rather than throwing more raw computing power at the problem.

About the author

Bart Sjerps joined EMC in 2000 after a stormy career as UNIX engineer – managing about 80 high-end UNIX servers running mostly Oracle based applications. Bart is Principal Systems Engineer since 2014 after being Technical Architect, Technical Account Manager, Solutions Architect, Technical Consultant and Advisory Systems Engineer (what’s in a name…). Currently he helps customers and prospects in Europe, Middle East and Africa optimizing their Oracle environments on DellEMC infrastructure – thereby reducing cost, enabling growth, improving service levels and manageability and drive more performance out of customers’ infrastructure. He also occasionally deals with Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, and with ICT innovations in general. He lives in the beautiful south of the Netherlands with his wife Yvonne. He likes to spend free time “up in the air” as a private pilot and owns a share in a Piper Archer III. More info on his linkedin profile.

I’m not a native English speaker, so I apologize upfront for any language mistakes. Knowing that everyone has gotten used to iPad or smartphone keyboards these days, you won’t probably even notice 😉

I started this blog because I think I can contribute my knowledge and experiences to a larger community than just the few customers I directly talk to as part of my job. I don’t get paid for blogging, but my opinions are probably highly influenced by the fact that I work for EMC.

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. I am a blogger who works at DellEMC, not a DellEMC blogger. This is my blog, and not DellEMC’s. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by DellEMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of DellEMC.

This blog and the attached documents are provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.

All other thinkable disclaimers apply 😉