Henry Newman

My article three weeks ago on Linux file systems set off a firestorm unlike any other I’ve written in the decade I’ve been writing on storage and technology issues. My intentions were to relate my experience as an HPC storage consultant and my knowledge of file systems and operating systems to advise readers on the […]

I am frequently asked by potential customers with high I/O requirements if they can use Linux instead of AIX or Solaris. No one ever asks me about high-performance I/O — high IOPSor high streaming I/O — on Windows or NTFS because it isn’t possible. Windows and the NTFS file system, which hasn’t changed much since […]

There is a new storage technology on the market, but it’s really an old technology with a new twist: SSD drives made of flash memory. About 10 years ago, SSD companies and SSD drives were a hot commodity, but during the 2000-2002 downturn, almost all of them disappeared. SSDs were never easy to use for […]

NFS was designed by Sun Microsystems in 1984 to connect their systems, and in the process revolutionized the storage industry by allowing file systems to be connected, creating a common view of all the files within an environment. Back in 1984, the high-speed network backbone was 10 BaseT Ethernet and disk drive sizes where measured […]

Four years ago, I dreamt about what it would be like to be able to create my perfect storage product (I know what you’re thinking — I probably need to get out more). Back then I thought there were three areas that were lacking in the storage market. They were the following:   High performance […]

The recent EMC-NetApp benchmarking controversy got me thinking: Hardware isn’t the only benchmark category that could use an overhaul. File system benchmarks can be just as misleading (see Benchmarking Storage Systems). Hardware can be manipulated by clock speed, memory, bus, bios, compilers, and so on. But with file systems, you have even more variables and […]

Online backup vendors have got it all wrong. Last week’s article that showed that online backup providers vastly prefer disk over tape made me wonder if we had been transported back to 1999, when profits didn’t matter. Just based on acquisition costs and power usage, these vendors could be saving a fortune and providing a […]

It’s time once again to look back on the storage predictions I made a year ago and look ahead at what might be in our storage future for 2008 and beyond. We’ll start with a review of how I did last year, which for me is always an interesting exercise because I get to see […]

Data protection and backup get a lot of attention, and rightfully so, but silent data corruption, or “bit rot,” can wreak as much if not more havoc and be tougher to correct (see My Totally Excellent Data Corruption Adventure — Not! and Keeping Silent About Silent Data Corruption). One of the best and latest examinations […]

As the growth of data and files continues to explode, use of traditional backup techniques becomes more and more difficult, fueling the growth of hierarchical storage management systems (HSM) systems. But the process is not without some glaring problems. Some of the problems that affect HSM and archiving also affect backup, but archiving systems generally […]

It was not all that long ago that RAID-6 was just some theoretical RAID level in books that was not implemented by vendors. RAID was expensive, and the cost of adding an extra parity drive was pricey. And since RAID reconstruction was relatively fast, given disk performance compared to density (more on this later), RAID-6 […]

A “hot spot” in storage architecture isn’t nearly as racy as it sounds. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: It’s a part of the disk system that has significantly high activity and is usually characterized by long wait times for I/O requests and long waits for the data from those requests. Hot spots in a […]