Henry Newman

I recently received a call from my wife saying that some of her pictures (she is a semi-professional photographer) were not displaying correctly and she had a show coming up and needed to get them printed and framed. The preview window in Photoshop was displaying only part of the picture and said there was an […]

Every few months at Enterprise Storage Forum, we meet to discuss story ideas. One that comes up often is how much vendors use fear to sell their products — they would have you believe that without their product, your data center will collapse under its own weight. Using fear to sell products is nothing new […]

This might sound a little weird coming from a lifelong propeller head, but the last home video game I played was Pong back in the 1970s, and that was because one of my cousins got it for his birthday. Pong and other early games bear little resemblance to the games of today. Besides the technology […]

It wasn’t too long ago that iSCSI vendors were claiming they were going to take over the world and leave Fibre Channel (FC) storage and SANs in the dust, and many industry pundits agreed. Corporations wanted a single network infrastructure and single management method and also wanted to eliminate unnecessary positions, they said. Several years […]

Sometimes I have written articles with the best of intentions, only to discover at some point in the future that I’d like to retract what I said. This is a hazard of what I do, which is to try to anticipate storage trends, so I’m no stranger to being wrong. I just try not to […]

In the first part of this series, we began an examination of the real cost differences between Fibre Channel (FC) and SATA. My assumption was that in environments that require performance, SATA is more costly than FC or the new SAStechnology. While SATA may be anywhere from one-third to 90 percent cheaper than FC, depending […]

This is the first in a two-part series that looks at the real cost of storage. The cost of storage is not just the cost of the drives and the RAID controller, but also includes the power costs for the drives and the cooling of the air because of the heat the drives create, among […]

PCI Express, often called PCI-E, has important implications for system architecture that you will need to consider as you design architectures around this new bus structure. Already the technology has made possible the growing popularity of InfiniBand-based storage and connections (see InfiniBand: Is This Time for Real?). For the first time, the performance of an […]

It was not that long ago that a big database was something less than 2 TB. Today large databases can mean 100 or more terabytes, a growth of about 50 times in less than a decade. We all know that storage performance has not increased at nearly the same rate (see Storage Headed for Trouble). […]

In my role as a storage and high performance computing consultant, I was recently working for a customer who was installing a very large archive system. We spent a number of years specifying the requirements, developing and writing the request for proposals (RFP), reviewing proposals, choosing a winner, getting the system installed and finally accepted. […]

Another year has come and gone, and so it’s time once again to look back on our storage predictions for 2006 and look ahead at what might be in store for 2007. In so doing, we’ll examine where the storage market has been, and try to glean where it may be headed. We’ll start with […]

The idea for this article came out of a talk I was asked to give on why the I/O stack we have today is not well integrated (see Solving the I/O Problem). It got me thinking about how we got to where we are with the current I/O stack, which I think looks like this: […]