The Secret Life of Storage

Theres a worldwide conspiracy among technology users—a conspiracy of silence. For all the advances of a consumer digital lifestyle, the increasing services offered over broadband, the mining of data for profit and villains, and Internet video, many folks seem to avoid the word "storage" like the plague.

The memory devices that we put in our digital cameras—this years popular stocking-stuffer gift for the holidays—should be called "cards" and "sticks." Please dont call them storage.

The digital video and audio (and data galore) found on DVDs and CDs are "media" and "discs." No way that they are storage.

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Tape vendors appear to mean storage when they use words such as "capacity" and "throughput." However, when we look closely, they insist its all about backups and cartridges. Not storage.

Of course, hard drive manufacturers must be in the storage business. But at times even they take the Technology-That-Must-Not-Be-Named approach.

"Storage" nowadays denotes big storage: clustered server-side architectures such as NAS (network-attached storage) and SAN (storage area networks). Both of these products already have "storage" in their name, so theres no way of getting around it—they must be storage.

This confusing name game for storage developed in historical times around the different market segments and when many storage technologies vied against each other. There was a time when it all made sense, or at least it must have to those holding discussions at standards committee meetings and trade association powwows.

Forget the name game: Welcome to Ziff Davis Medias Storage Supersite, where were proud of storage in all its incarnations, from the smallest memory dongle to the petabyte server. Its all storage here.

The Storage Supersite recognizes that the performance, reliability, cost of ownership and lifecycle of a storage technology can be critical to your data. Storage can affect your business, for good or ill, or determine the survival of your significant personal memories.

We will provide the big picture of the storage market, including news and analysis of hard disks, optical and tape storage, memory media, and the bus standards used to connect them to your computer and logic board. And we will also keep you up-to-date on storage-specific applications, particularly backup, storage management and data formats.

At the same time, storage is more than a collection of products and technologies. While often considered just a backwater of the greater technology industry, storage is a market in-and-of-itself. The Storage Supersite will track the companies involved with storage.

My name is David Morgenstern, and Im a storage addict.

I look forward to hearing from you about storage and the storage business as well as the Storage Supersite and its coverage.

David Morgenstern is a longtime watcher of the storage industry as well as a veteran of the dotcom boom in the storage-rich fields of professional content creation and digital video.