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 October 2008
10/29/2008
Last month I wrote about my general misgivings about selling used data tapes for reuse. My New Yorker's general skepticism left me dubious that the few dollars I got for sending a box of tapes via UPS or FedEx to Joe the used tape salesman was worth the risk that some of my data might make it to Christopher the identity thief. Today I got a press release from Imation reporting that they purchased around 100 "recertified" tapes from "leading recertifyers as found on Google" and found recoverab
10/23/2008
All the attention that storage punditry, including this humble reporter, has given data deduplication in the past few years has pushed that old, reliable data-reduction technology compression toward the dust bin of used up technology in the minds of many storage users. That's too bad, as loss-less compression is still an important data-reduction tool. One vendor, Storwize, has made a nice little business for itself making NAS compression appliances and now it's claiming each appliance can handle
10/20/2008
In a coincidence so large I'm sure Richard Belzer is starting a conspiracy theory about it, both the San Diego Chargers at Buffalo Bills game this Sunday and game 6 of the American League Championship Series on Saturday were knocked out by technology failures. What is the world coming to? If the proletariat isn't feed a constant stream of sports entertainment to take their minds off the events of the day, the workers will rise up to seize the means of production, or vote. That, and PR folks have
10/13/2008
A new Nevada law (NRS 597.970) effective Oct. 1 requires that businesses in Nevada encrypt personal information whenever it is electronically transmitted outside the business by any means other than fax. Predictably, I got a press release from an encryption software vendor that said "Even if a business never sends customer information via e-mail, the business will be at risk if a server, desktop, laptop, or electronic storage device is lost, stolen, or compromised." The real problem is
10/12/2008
Not so many years ago, optical storage looked like the future. While hard drives held 200MB, magneto-optical disks stored 650 MB and that could be WORM (Write Once Read Many), making optical jukeboxes the only storage medium that could meet the not deletable, not modifiable requirements of the regulations Wall Street broker dealers and other assorted deep-pocket customers had to comply with. Now it looks like optical disks may join head-per-track disks on the scrapheap of storage.
10/9/2008
Dell's new DL2000 backup appliances represent the company's first backup appliances aimed at the midmarket, providing those SMBs that view Dell as their primary technology vendor with a turnkey backup-to-disk solution. Dell is bundling a 2U server (that looks a lot like a PowerEdge 2900 to me) with its MD1000 SAS attached SAS/SATA JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) external cabinets and enhanced versions of either Symantec's Backup Exec or CommVault's Simpana backup.
10/5/2008
While, as the mutual fund ads always say, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, knowing your area's hurricane history can help you with your Disaster Recovery plan. NOAA's new historical hurricane tracking site displays hurricane and other major storm tracks for past 150 years
10/5/2008
I don't know if the it was the heat or just a lack of better things to do, but drop-testing drives seems to have replaced Vespa jousting as the geek sport of the month in August. First Popular Mechanics magazine ran a portable USB hard drive drop test, subjecting several drives to higher and higher drops until they failed. Video here. Then Samsung tossed one of its laptop SSDs off the roof of its building in sil
10/1/2008
LeftHand Networks was one of the first vendors in the iSCSI market and has always had the best of the iSCSI solutions that runs on standard x86 server hardware. It has transitioned over the past couple of years from selling whitebox servers with its SAN/iQ software bundled in to primarily selling SAN/iQ as software, upping the ante this February by releasing SAN/iQ as a VMware virtual appliance.