Henry Newman

Here is my working hypothesis: POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) can’t scale to meet the demand of clouds and big data, but REST (Representational State Transfer) can’t manage and tier data the way POSIX can, but will likely get those features in the next few years and then take off as the new data interface […]

I was recently at a customer site working on a problem they had. This group was a customer of a large NAS vendor (no vendor names used in my articles) and had many PB of NFS attached storage. They were looking at potentially purchasing a new parallel file system, and part of my job was to help […]

I have been saying this for a long time, and the trend is clear: whatever your application, be it cloud, Hadoop or file system, appliances are in your future. If you have a storage problem, at least one vendor has a solution to your problem that plugs in and works. Data center consolidation, either within […]

Almost three years ago, I made the seemingly bold statement that SSDs would not replace spinning disks, and the flash vendors of that time told me I was wrong. Three years later, we still have spinning disks. And though the market units are steady to slightly down, the number of exabytes shipped is steadily increasing. […]

The concept of putting a cache in front of storage to improve performance is back again. The last time I remember this happening was in the early 2000s, and it failed miserably. Yes it did work for some application areas, but for the most part, the concepts did not work very well for general purpose […]

A few weeks ago, I was traveling and for some reason The Wall Street Journal was delivered to my hotel room door. When thumbing through it, an article on Big data and Cancer (subscription required) caught my eye. I also found another article on the topic at SmartPlanet, which does not require a subscription. I […]

These days, people are using the word “dumb” regularly to describe everything from from sequestration to movies. I figured I should jump into the mix with a bold statement: I think OEM storage vendors are being forced to “dumb down” storage because we do not have the storage talent to manage the complexity we have […]

While on vacation last week I read an amazingly good book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t by Nate Silver. For those of you who have not heard of Mr. Silver, here is a quote from Amazon: “Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, […]

Did anyone hear the story on NPR on storing some of Shakespeare’s sonnets in DNA? The two researchers are not the first to develop an encoding scheme and storing things in DNA. The researchers Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman even addressed a concern that I had with DNA, which is mutation, which we call bit […]

Recently, I have been thinking about the design of past, current and future storage platforms. It is pretty clear to me and lots of other people that our industry is quickly moving away from SAN storage and local file systems to storage-based appliances. Thinking about this phenomenon, I have asked a few of my friends, […]

The world has had only one agreed upon file system standard from about the mid-1980s. It is based on the POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface). POSIX came from IEEE Standard 1003.1-1988, released in 1988. And the last change to POSIX file system I/O was to add asynchronous I/O system calls back in 1991. One of […]

It is that time of year again when we look back to see where we’ve been and look forward to see where the storage industry is going. Every year, I try to predict technology winners, losers and those stuck in the middle. Both 2010 and 2011 saw significant stagnation in the storage industry, but in […]