Tom Clark

Storage administrators are often the unsung heroes of data management. Charged with maintaining data availability and safeguarding the vital information that drives their companies’ businesses, storage administrators frequently face restrictive budgets, a lack of support from upper management, and the joy of juggling the requirements of multiple departments simultaneously. For most IT shops, the storage […]

With over ten years of standards and product development behind it, Fibre Channel is now a mature and established technology for storage networking. Link layer protocols are efficient and stable; switches provide high performance and are scaling to higher port counts; and Fibre Channel arrays, tape subsystems, and host connections are offered by all the […]

Long ago in the Mesozoic mainframe era of monolithic domination of the market by a single vendor, the vendor had enormous power over the customer. That power was exercised in a variety of ways, including manipulation of pricing, control over product delivery, availability of technical resources, and accessibility to upper management. Any customer whose vendor […]

A leading commentator on the storage industry recently wrote that interoperability demonstrations such as those staged at Storage Networking World (SNW) conferences have little practical value for customers. After SAN management issues, interoperability is still the second leading concern for end users of shared storage technologies, and although showcase interoperability demonstrations express a high degree […]

Information in the form of data represents a significant portion of valuable corporate assets. Because data ultimately resides on disk arrays and tape, the safeguarding of storage is a key component of business continuity and disaster recovery. As with tape backup projects, though, working on a disaster recovery strategy is a kind of purgatory — […]

In conventional IP networks, the end systems or hosts are the active participants in data communications. The network that links hosts together has one primary goal — to quickly switch or route host-generated messages from source to destination. Advanced network-based services such as Quality of Service or data encryption may require processing power or “intelligence” […]

In insecure times, security threats seem to be everywhere. When even little old ladies are made to take off their shoes for the airport x-ray machines, you know that everyone is a suspect until proven otherwise. SAN technology, which in its early career avoided strip searches before entering the data center, is also now coming […]

A few years ago, it was common to see articles in the trade press hotly debating the respective merits of network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs). SANs were denounced as being too difficult to deploy and manage, according to NAS zealots, while NAS was condemned as being too slow and unscalable, according to […]