Oracle loses another open storage star

MIke Shapiro quits

By Chris Mellor, 23rd October 2010

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

Oracle's VP for Open Storage, MIke Shapiro, is resigning and will leave a significant hole to be filled.

Oracle inherited Mike Shapiro as part of the Sun acquisition. He was a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Sun, heading the Fishworks engineering team and leading the creation of the ZFS Storage product line between 2005 and 2008. He was one of the three creators of the DTrace diagnostic software, and a three-time winner of the Sun Chairman's Award for Innovation. At Oracle he reported directly to John Fowler, the Sun-inherited EVP for Server and storage engineering.

All three members of the main DTrace engineering team have now left Oracle. with Shapiro following Adam Leventhal and Bryan Cantrill out of the gate. Leventhal also worked on the Sun 7000 system when he was at Sun and Oracle. Brian Cantrill has since become the VP for Engineering at Joyent.

When approached on Friday about Mike Shapiro leaving, an Oracle spokesperson said: "We decline comment."

Here is the text of Mike Shapiro's e-mail:

From: Mike Shapiro
Date: October 22, 2010 1:17:23 PM PDT
...
In 2005, five years ago this week, I decided with some friends it was time to take some of the core technology in Solaris and take it in a decidedly different direction, into storage.

For me, the past five years has been an amazing experience, leading me to many places I never imagined. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

But my heart is still in engineering, and in being a new dad to my beautiful daughter, and so for me my two-year career as VP of Storage and Solaris is at an end. I am resigning because my effort on behalf of my team to bring ZFS Storage to maturity and to success and a strong position at its new company in a real storage org is now done: we made it. From outside, as a fan, I will be waiting eagerly to see what my team will accomplish next.

For you, my friends, colleagues, and mentors at Sun and Oracle, thank you. You made every day of my 13 years of work on Solaris and ZFS Storage fun and unforgettable.

-Mike

MySQL engineers have also left Oracle, which has a different ethos regarding engineering and open source software than Sun, where the engineers now reckon they had halcyon days as kings of the heap.

It is not known if Shapiro has a job to go to. ®

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