More articles by Henry Newman

As the recessions drags its way to a close, many enterprises have upgrade needs and budget to spend in an environment that has seen little innovation. Deciding whether to go with a forklift or incremental upgrade is not a choice to be made lightly.

However you feel about cloud storage, it is a consideration for many applications. Evaluating cloud providers to determine the best solution for an enterprise is often an arduous and complex task. Learn what you can do to make it less painful.

If your recently bought storage system isn't delivering what your vendor promised, you're not alone in your frustration. Henry Newman explores why this is becoming increasingly common and what you can do to protect your enterprise.

SSD performance potential can be tough to achieve. As the claims get increasingly higher, do they make sense or even matter anymore?

When planning your virtual infrastructure, not thinking about the storage implications could be disastrous down the road. Most admins consider latency and overlook other critical issues, like these four potential showstoppers.

Henry Newman revisits his 2011 predictions for the storage industry and prognosticates about 2012 and beyond.

The benchmark arms race must end. It's time to shift the focus from peak performance to what really matters--scalability.

The vendors would not deliver the promised hardware for  our real-world testing. We ponder why and issue a challenge.

Thanks to many years of government investment, most of the major storage developments have occurred in the United States. With few ground-breaking changes on the horizon, will the United States hold the lead or will another nation take the reins?

The storage industry continues to make the same mistakes over and over again, and enterprises continue to take vendors' bold statements as facts.  Henry Newman ponders why enterprises continue to believe the current evolutionary file system path will meet our needs today and in the future and cost nothing.

Why does the storage industry continue to make the same mistakes over again and continue to take bold statements as fact?  

Multiple levels of security are the one surefire way to prevent a hacker from accessing and damaging your systems. Making SELinux the base for all systems will go a long way toward achieving this.

With its hard error rate, low power consumption and cooling costs, and cost per TB, tape remains the best medium for long-term storage. Like any medium, however, tape has a life span and associated limitations.

Wondering why your ext 3/4 maxes out at five disk drives and what you can do about? Henry Newman and Jeff Layton are going under the hood in this four-part series to determine what is at the heart of the ever-growing file system scaling problem. This installment explains the problem and what their testing and evaluation process will be.

Tape migration is one of the biggest issues with which storage admin are grappling. It's both difficult and costly, but it is imperative to begin the process with your eyes open, and sooner rather than later.

When you benchmark FCoE and iSCSI, the former is clearly the superior technology, so what hasn't Fibre Channel over Ethernet taken the industry by storm?

My challenge to the community is to develop a standard for parallel I/O that supports all of the features and functions of MPI-IO and more.

Large preservation archives could benefit from techniques used in high performance computing.

Disaster recovery is often discussed in broad terms throughout the storage industry, but in this article we explore a specific segment of the overall market: DR planning for large archives.

It is another year and another try at predicting the future in our complex storage industry.

The cost of disk storage isn’t dropping as fast as it has in years past and storage density improvements are going to take far longer until new technology enters the market in 2013 or 2014.

Will storage management technologies improve over the next few years? For storage administrators, it’s going to be a slow journey out of storage management Hell, according to Henry Newman.

Henry Newman revisits the limitations of storage I/O and explains why the movement of data is at the mercy of the physical constraints within computers and storage hardware.

The latency of the Internet is greater than the latency of disk, so what's the point of Flash cache for Web devices?

Whether you have a controller card on your PC or a high-end mission-critical enterprise array, you can configure RAID to make the most of your storage performance if you know a few things about your data and file system.

Despite the predictions of some in the storage industry, the limitations of lithography will keep the flash market from overtaking hard drives.

High-end tape storage is the most reliable enterprise storage media, orders of magnitude better than SAS drives, so why can't it be put to better use?

Drive reliability and bandwidth limitations make cloud storage a near impossibility for very large data stores.

The effect of the evolution of Ethernet on the data storage market offers a case study in the causes of technology market disruption and innovation.

How to spot signs that an IT vendor might not execute on its product strategy.

Issues like wear leveling and your SAS or RAID controller will determine whether SSDs succeed in your storage networking environment.

There are many reliability and performance issues to consider before adding SSDs to your enterprise storage networking environment.

SSDs can improve database and file system performance, but there are a number of issues that need to be addressed to make the most of the pricey drives.

New technologies like phase change memory could make storage networks irrelevant unless the industry bands together to address I/O bottlenecks.

Enterprise storage columnist Henry Newman sees FCoE and SSD mergers coming, but there are no clouds in his forecast.

The digital future will require a level of file and data integrity that doesn't exist today, but there are some possible solutions.

Not only might NAS replace SAN in the coming world of Ethernet-based storage, but the distinctions between the two might also disappear.

Much has changed since storage networks first appeared — and the biggest changes may be yet to come.

Bandwidth and data integrity issues could limit enterprise use of external storage clouds.

The long-running data storage technology could be headed for trouble. We look at the problem — and potential solutions.

Some high-end data storage technologies could radically change your home PC in the not too distant future.

The storage world as we know it is about to change — and not all RAID vendors are ready.

Recent steep drops in the price of 10Gb Ethernet NICs mean that Fibre Channel's decade-long dominance will soon be over.

File system benchmarks can be difficult to evaluate, creating tough choices for storage customers. We offer some tips on what to look for.

Even in tough times, there's more to data storage purchasing decisions than saving money.

Commentary: What a 4,000-year-old Egyptian obelisk can teach us about data backup, archiving and preservation of our history — and why it's critical that we get started now.

The POSIX file system interface isn't up to the task of managing today's data, resulting in costly fixes for users to solve problems like data integrity and regulatory compliance. It doesn't have to be that way.

It will take a whole lot of effort to get end-to-end data security, but it has to be done.

After batting .800 on this year's predictions, it's time once again for our intrepid enterprise storage columnist to peer into his crystal ball and see what's in store for the storage market for 2009 and beyond.

E-Discovery systems pose unique challenges for storage architects if they want to keep up with data growth, performance and backup and recovery demands.

Storage virtualization has some limitations that could make it ill-suited for high-performance environments.

If you virtualize your server environment without taking storage into consideration, your performance will likely suffer.

The storage networking world could be profoundly changed by three emerging technologies.

Disk drives, tapes and storage networks can create inadvertent errors. What the storage industry needs is a comprehensive framework to discover them before they become a problem.

If you're thinking about purchasing a data de-duplication solution, you need to take a hard look at the issue of data corruption.

Despite the outcry from the open source faithful, Linux file systems will require some changes to handle the 100 TB environments that will become commonplace in the not too distant future.

Linux file systems have a number of limitations that make them a poor choice for large and high-performance computing environments.

Flash-based solid state drives are beginning to show up in enterprise storage, and while promising for high-performance applications, they have some reliability issues that must be addressed.

NFSv4.1 and Parallel NFS will finally bring the 24-year-old protocol into the high-speed networking age.

If users, vendors and standards bodies all got along, this is what the storage world might look like.

Hardware isn't the only benchmark category that could use an overhaul; file system benchmarks can be just as misleading.

Online backup vendors have got it all wrong by using disk instead of tape.

Our resident storage guru steps out onto a limb to see what's in store for the storage market in 2008, including some big news for SAS, IP storage and undetectable errors.