Henry Newman

We failed. Jeff and I tried and tried to get the hardware to run the file system tests that we had written about. Originally, Jeff had all of the hardware all lined up, but it was taken away at the last minute, as it was required to be used for a benchmark. Jeff tried some […]

The United States leads in storage now, but what about in the future? I am not, nor have I ever been, xenophobic, but I have been wondering why most of the major storage developments related to filesystems, channels, RAID controllers, disk drives, tape drives, standards and so on take place in the United States, and […]

The storage industry continues to make the same mistakes over and over again, and enterprises continue to take vendors’ bold statements as facts. Previously, we introduced our two-part series, “The Evolution of Stupidity,” explaining how issues seemingly resolved more than 20 years ago are again rearing their heads. Clearly, the more things change, the more […]

Catchy title, right? Here’s where it came from? A few times a year, the editorial team and I have a conference call to discuss future articles, brainstorm ideas and try to address industry trends. A few months ago we had such a call and I was ranting about a variety of topics that I was […]

We have all heard about the high-profile cases of groups hacking into a system and making off with the loot. Once the hacker gets into a system, it is pretty clear that anything the hacker wants is fair game. Of course, that starts with getting root access, and once the hacker gets root access, any […]

In August 2006 I wrote an article exposing the fact that, like any device, tape has a life span. As all of you who read this column regularly know, I am a big proponent of tape and archival storage. I believe that given the hard error rate, the very low power usage and low cooling […]

If you are a regular reader you know Jeff Layton and I have similar approaches to technology issues and problem solving. We also both like file systems and work on storage. We recently ran into each other at a file system user group meeting and were discussing Linux file systems and file systems in general […]

Tape used for computers has been around for about 60 years. That makes the technology older than most and far older than most of the people working in the industry today. Since the backup market for tape is now a far smaller percentage of the market than the archive market, tape migration is one of […]

I have long been a proponent of FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). At one time, before the 2008 economic meltdown, I thought that paradigm-shifting technologies changes such as object storage and FCoE were on our doorstep. It hasn’t worked out exactly as I envisioned. I’m sad to say T10 compliant object storage was a total […]

Even 20 years ago applications ran in parallel in novel research projects at companies such as Thinking Machines and Kendall Square Research. Neither of those companies are still in business, nor are almost all of the companies started during the early days of parallel architectures, but parallel applications are used everywhere today and not just […]

Both tape-based and disk-based archives are growing at tremendous rates that are exceeding the density increases in storage technology and the reliability of storage. Humans are pack rats and the amount of data we save keeps growing, and this is unlikely to change. Part of the reason is that we do not know when data […]

Disaster recovery (DR) is often discussed in broad terms throughout the storage industry, but in this article I will explore a specific segment of the overall market: DR planning for large archives. This is the first article in a two-part series on archives. The next article will cover architectural planning for large archives. First, what […]