Augmented Reality for Storage Management

This project won an EMC Innovation Conference Award, from a field of several thousand entries. The basic idea is to use the camera, GPS, and compass on a mobile device to show a virtual overlay on top of the physical view of a storage device - augmenting the reality. Virtual information might include power, temperature, CPU, I/Os per second, etc.

One particular common use case is replacing a failed part. In this scenario, the user receives an email about their failed component and clicks on the replace component link to open the app. The app contacts the array to identify faulted enclosure QR code and location of failed component in the enclosure.

The user walks into the lab and start scanning QR codes on arrays to locate the correct one.

They open the front cover and scan each enclosure in the rack to find the one with a problem component:

Then the failed component is highlighted and they can get detailed directions on how to replace it:

The idea won some incubation funding and a small group from the advanced development team worked with me on a proof of concept. We ended up tweaking the actual implementation due to limitations in the real-time image processing power of most mobile devices. In the end we created three different apps: Tell Me, Find Me, and Fix Me.