Henry Newman

Data storage hardware has improved, yet still strains at the limits. Data storage expert Henry Newman looks at the underlying science and discusses trends in storage capacity over a multi-year timespan. This is an update of one of my first articles for Enterprise Storage Forum from way back in 2002. The article was well received, […]

Data storage expert Henry Newman provides background information on caching issues, including what works well on the Web. Key point: the central issue is data access patterns for both the Web and local storage – what is being accessed and when. More and more vendors are making wild claims about their appliances with Flash cache. […]

Armed with the proper guidance, data center administrators can squeeze more performance from their RAID controllers. Storage expert Henry Newman discusses the key points: Tuning RAID controllers is not as difficult as some vendors would have you believe; there’s no need for professional services to get the job done. Many of the parameters reside around […]

It wasn’t that long ago that solid state drives (SSDs) were DRAM-based and cost a fortune. Then the proliferation of mobile devices requiring shock and vibration profiles that exceeded hard drives created a huge market for flash. Prices dropped, and with more money available for R&D, the density increased dramatically. It’s been a period of […]

We have all heard for years about tiered data storage for disk arrays. Tier 1 is usually enterprise disk, which was once Fibre Channel but more and more is becoming SAS. Tier 2 is typically enterprise SATA, while tier 3 might be consumer-grade drives. And the last year or two has seen the rise of […]

As someone who designs data storage networkingsystems, I often get non-disclosure agreement (NDA) briefings from vendors and review public roadmaps, as I’m sure many of you do also. I often find myself dismayed at the difference between what and when vendors tell me is coming and the timetable and features of the actual product. We […]

Choosing the right solid state drive (SSD) for your enterprise storage networkingenvironment is a critical decision — and equally critical is making sure you have the right controller to get the most out of the pricey drives. The first two parts of this series covered solid state drive application and software issues and reliability and […]

Flashed-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming a big issue for enterprise storage users; a number of customers I work with are planning for this new “tier 0” data storage for a number of reasons. It could be as simple as IOPS per watt, IOPS per dollar, or for some applications, bandwidth per GB/sec of storage. […]

It seems like just about every day brings with it a new cloud storage product announcement from vendors big and small, but the reality is that beyond enterprise firewalls, cloud storage’s potential is limited. There are two reasons for this: bandwidth limitations and the data integrity issues posed by the commodity drives that are typically […]

The concept of parity-based RAID(levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology’s limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future — and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to […]