Henry Newman

A few months ago, I received an email from a reader in Australia, Iain Anderson, who took issue with my article Purchasing Professional Storage Services, Part 1. Here is what Iain had to say: An important aspect which I believe may be missing from your paper is IT practices, which your storage vendor should be […]

As file systems have continued to grow in size, fragmentation has become an increasingly important issue. It wasn’t all that long ago that we were living with measly 2 GB file systems and even smaller files. And while vendors were next able to provide file systems up to 2 TB, file sizes were still often […]

In open storage environments it’s quite common for a person or group of people to be called upon to resolve an issue that involves the hardware and/or software of multiple vendors. More often than not these are very complex problems that need to be resolved quickly and efficiently. I say they are complex as this […]

In our last article we covered some of the basics of purchasing storage professional services (Storage PS). This time we are going to go into more detail on determining who would be best for which types of jobs and why. We’ll start with a key point from the first article. Basically, integration of new storage […]

One of the largest costs associated with storage hardware and software acquisition is purchasing the services to integrate the hardware and software into your working environment. When you purchase hardware and software storage solutions you often have to make a choice in terms of who will handle integrating all the pieces and making the new […]

A few weeks ago I had a dream that I was the COB, CEO, and CTO of a major storage company, with the opportunity to architect and develop any product I wanted. Basically, I got to be the storage king in this dream, but of course, with being a king comes the responsibilities of your […]

All too often I have seen the process of determining what storage and configuration settings should be assigned to a database become a completely disjointed process. The database architect is typically a database expert and knows little about the low-level details of storage configuration. Combine this with the fact that the storage administrators and architects […]

This is the final installment in our three-part series on benchmarking. Part 1 examined each of the components that might be included in a typical benchmark, while Part 2 looked at developing representations of your workload as well as the pros and cons of using your applications and real data in the benchmark as opposed […]

This is the second in a three-part series on benchmarking. Part 1 examined each of the components that might be included in a typical benchmark. Today we’ll look at developing representations of your workload as well as the pros and cons of using your applications and real data in the benchmark as opposed to developing […]

Benchmarking storage systems has become very complex over the years given all of the hardware and software parts being used for both NAS and SAN systems. In order to conduct an effective storage benchmark, it’s important to have a solid understanding of all of the parts needed for a storage benchmark, how to create the […]

Over the last year we’ve looked at different rates of increases for CPUs and storage, which show improvements in storage are clearly lagging behind those of processing power. IDC, Gartner Group, and all the industry pundits agree that storage needs will grow faster than the increase in CPU power. Even with the recession, storage is […]

Since 9/11 all types of organizations have been talking about, struggling with, and implementing various disaster recovery plans. Even before 9/11 many sites with critical data had already implemented plans that allowed management to sleep at night knowing their companies could recover from a disaster. Providing a disaster recovery plan for your home, small office, […]