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Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an IC doubles every two years or so, is a commonly used measure of the rapid development of computer technology.
The storage industry, however, long ago transcended Moore’s Law, with new hardware components, systems, software and services being developed at a pace unmatched in any industry.
Hard drives with capacities of 3TBs? Storage appliances that can scale capacity to infinity? Good old-fashioned -- and cheap -- IP networks replacing high-speed Fibre Channel and InfiniBand? Things that would have seemed impossible five years ago are now commonplace. None of this would have been possible without the early realization that the cost of raw storage capacity would start approaching free, and the vision that new ways to store, back up, retrieve, archive and, above all, manage users’ and companies’ data would be required.
Enter the storage visionaries. This group of talented individuals -- some of the smartest people on the planet -- live and breathe storage. They protect, nurture and grow the storage on which business, academia, industry and entertainment thrive.
These storage visionaries -- these Storage Superstars -- are an eclectic lot of individuals. They include people like NetApp’s Julie Parrish or EMC’s Gregg Ambulos, who are in customers’ and partners’ faces every day loudly driving and promoting their companies’ visions. Or people like NetApp’s James Lau, who are so shy that just getting a photograph can be a difficult task.
They include the technology developers of brash, young companies like Coraid and Pivot3 with bold new ideas about how to manage storage. Or folks like Holly Frost at Texas Memory Systems, a guy who has been working on SSD technology for 30 years at the company he founded. CRN shines a light on these Storage Superstars. Some were easy to find, while others may not have seen sunlight for years.
