Profile of Howard Marks
Network Computing Blogger
News & Commentary Posts: 141
Howard Marks is founder and chief scientist at Deepstorage LLC, a storage consultancy and independent test lab based in Santa Fe, N.M. and concentrating on storage and data center networking. In more than 25 years of consulting, Marks has designed and implemented storage systems, networks, management systems and Internet strategies at organizations including American Express, J.P. Morgan, Borden Foods, U.S. Tobacco, BBDO Worldwide, Foxwoods Resort Casino and the State University of New York at Purchase. The testing at DeepStorage Labs is informed by that real world experience.
He has been a frequent contributor to Network Computing and InformationWeek since 1999 and a speaker at industry conferences including Comnet, PC Expo, Interop and Microsoft's TechEd since 1990. He is the author of Networking Windows and co-author of Windows NT Unleashed (Sams).
He is co-host, with Ray Lucchesi of the monthly Greybeards on Storage podcast where the voices of experience discuss the latest issues in the storage world with industry leaders. You can find the podcast at: http://www.deepstorage.net/NEW/GBoS
Articles by Howard Marks
posted in June 2008
6/30/2008
Today Adaptec dumped their money loosing Snap Appliance division, once as much a mindshare leader in NAS as NetApp, to Overland Storage for $3.6 million after buying it just 4 years ago for $100 million. Overland gets a quality line of NAS appliances to add to its mix of tape libraries, REO VTL/disk backup appliances and Ultamus Fibre Channel RAID arrays along with a sublet of Snap's plant and around 50 employees. Adaptec will keep the top of the line 700 series iSCSI arrays and get to concentr
6/25/2008
Anyone that's read this blog even occasionally knows I'm a big fan of online backup for the SOHO to SMB market. After seeing literally hundreds of backup failures as small businesses tried to use tape drives and applications you and I would consider easy to use, like Retrospect and Backup Exec, I've come to the conclusion that tape drives, like backhoes and heart/lung machines, should be left to professionals. If you aren't a certifiable geek and don't have a full-time IT staff, you shouldn't ha
6/23/2008
In a further attempt to position its deduplicating NAS appliances as general purpose data repositories, Data Domain has added date retention enforcement as an optional feature. This follows naturally from the redesign of the file system last year to support a large number of small files as well as the small number of large files typical of a backup target.
6/23/2008
HP officially joined the data deduplicators club today after several alert storage news sites including our own Byte and Switch broke the news from a premature update of HP's Turkish website. As expected they're adding Sepaton's DeltaStor, which they're calling Accelerated DeDuplication, to the VLS VTLs they've been OEMing from Sepaton for the past few years. More interesting are the new D2D2500 and D2D4000 appliances HP is targeting at what if you're HP or EMC is the SMB market but to those o
6/23/2008
Following Red Hat in giving the software away and charging for support, BakBone Software is giving away a special free-use edition of its NetVault backup software. The free-use edition can handle backup for up to two client servers and up to 500 GB of disk through NetVault's built-in software virtual tape library, which makes standard disk emulate a tape library.
6/17/2008
In a shocking demonstration of good citizenship, Colorado-based e-mail management vendor MX Logic is giving two months of free service to businesses and organizations in the flooded-out Midwest. Busineses can reroute their e-mail to MX Logic's servers and use MX Logic's spam, virus, and other filtering services, in addition to giving their users fully functional Webmail until their e-mail infrastructure can be restored. Once users have rebuilt their infrastructure, MX Logic will forward all the
6/15/2008
NEC has been quietly selling its Express Cluster for Windows and Linux servers for more than 10 years while noiser competitors like Double-Take Software and CA XOsoft have gotten most of the attention. NEC's sold more than 10,000 copies of Express Cluster. Granted, some of that was in the Japanese home market, but it still put them in the top 5 in the market segment.
6/13/2008
I've talked about ioSafe's fire-resistant USB hard drive and NAS solutions in previous posts and even posted the response I got from the company's CEO. Last week they took me out for lunch and offered a Riverside Drive barbecue, which I, afraid of how Hoboken's finest would respond, politely declined. The motivation for this was their newest product, the ioSafe 3.5, which wraps a 2.5-inch hard drive in shiny steel and fireproofing to enable it to survive 1,400 degrees F for 15 minutes and waterp
6/13/2008
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem. Since IT was the only group that included disaster recovery and/or business continuity planning as a line item on our budgets, senior management has let the geek squad (that's us, not the guys from Circuit City) run with the ball. We can manage to keep all the data safe, keep the applications up and running, and even set up a virtual desktop and SSL VPN environment so the users can run their applications from the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot, but how many of you
6/11/2008
Here in steamy Orlando at Microsoft's TechEd IT Pros geekfest, Double-Take Software and Neverfail both announced that they'll be supporting MS's upcoming Hyper-V server virtualization hypervisor.
6/10/2008
Answering the question "Why would anyone want to dedupe as a post process" with a data-ingestion rate of a whopping 9.5 GB/s (Yes, that's GigaBYTES per second), Sepaton announced its newer, bigger faster virtual tape library, imaginatively named the S2100-ES2 VTL Series 1000 at the Symantec (formerly Veritas) Vision conference in Las Vegas this week.
6/7/2008
Despite well-received demos at the NAB show in April and promises then to ship its long-awaited Tapestry holographic storage drives and media in May, InPhase Technologies has once again missed a delivery date and is now promising drives and media for December. Since the first promised delivery date was back in 2006, I'm not holding my breath. It's too bad, as we could really use a high-capacity, random access, WORM storage device that didn't dra
6/3/2008
Taking advantage of the new 500-GB, 2.5-inch laptop drives recently released by Hitachi, Samsung, and Fujitsu, ProStor Systems is boosting the maximum capacity of its RDX removable disk cartridges, making them an even more viable alternative to tape for SMB backup and archival storage.
6/2/2008
In the most recent of what seems to be an endless litany of mistakes by people who should know better Bank of New York Mellon has used a third party carrier to transport data tapes from one of their sites to another and as Gomer Pyle would say "surprise, surprise" the courier lost the package. Twice. On February 27th they lost a box of tapes with data on over 4 million customers, on April 29 they lost another tape. In addition to responding with the usual, patently untrue, platitude "Protectin
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