More articles by Henry Newman

IT storage administrators will need to understand data storage appliances if they want to remain employed.

Despite what flash vendors say, SSDs are not going to replace hard disks completely anytime soon.

The idea of adding cache to storage is coming back into vogue again.

As researchers find new uses for big data--like personalized cancer treatment--it could result in a data explosion larger than anyone has predicted.

As appliances take over storage, enterprises don't need as many highly skilled storage administrators.

The trend toward data analysis and forecasting may require us to change how we view archives.

Two British scientists realized that human DNA is a high capacity storage medium. Is this the future of storage?

What are the factors that are causing SAN storage to fall from dominance, and what does the rise of appliances mean for the storage industry?

Cloud storage cannot replace POSIX file systems fully, so various technologies will need to co-exist.

A look back at the forecasts made for 2012 and a look ahead to what the new year might bring.

Data in the cloud needs to be encrypted, which means businesses must understand how to safely handle the keys to that encryption.

Given that cloud storage is relatively new, selecting the best cloud storage vendor for your business presents unique challenges.

Proving that the cloud storage space offers some questionable advertising, Amazon’s Glacier makes some remarkable claims.

Generally, when organizations are deciding how many copies of a file they need on hand, they are really asking a reliability question about  the data. And the most common question that follow that is, are two copies  on low-cost, low-reliability media better than one copy on enterprise media?

The storage industry was not immune to the recession, and a variety of of storage technologies have been killed, shelved or delayed in the past four years. Some are now finding new life. These key 4 technologies are slowly resurging, but the delays around their development and acceptance will be felt for a long time.

Everyone is talking about Big Data, and this popular technology has implications up and down the storage stack. This new series will look at Big Data from each end of the spectrum -- from data extraction to the hardware needed to analyze the data, with  OS, file systems and other system software in the middle.

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.