I was recently going through some storage Web sites and came across a press release from 1961 about a new file I remember seeing when I first worked in the storage industry.  It was an announcement from Bryant about a new “High-Speed Parallel-Access Disk File.”  It was a disk drive with nearly 80 MBs that weighed 1700 lbs and sold for over $100,000.  And, this was back when 100 grand was real money.

The release got me thinking about the history of the storage industry and all the major milestones and breakthroughs over the past four decades.  All I can say, is WOW, we’ve come a very long way!  When you look at the capacity that can be stored on a device today, with over 10,000 times the capacity in less than one thousandth of the space, it’s really remarkable what this industry has accomplished.

Which brings me to the point of this post:  today, we launched a new – and I think pretty exciting – storage company, Pliant Technology (more on us later), and this blog.  I plan to use this blog as our outlet to share the experiences storage veterans and myself have  gathered over the past 40+ years (has it been that long?) in the storage industry, and provide our take on industry news, current trends and the latest technologies that are making waves.

My particular passion is analyzing where storage technology needs to go from here –particularly how it needs to evolve to higher levels of performance and efficiency to keep up with the advances of other enterprise technologies, while at the same time contributing to the WW Green effort by providing solutions enabling dramatic reductions in data center power consumption.

My goal here is to provide information that interests, challenges and even bothers you.  I’ve been in this business a long time and have seen many changes, and I’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the best in the business.  My plan is to bring all of this and more out on this blog.

I hope you’ll take the time to stop by to read, comment and even criticize on the blog.  If something strikes a chord – good or bad – I’d love to hear from you. 

Amyl Ahola

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 12:54 pm and is filed under enterprise storage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.