Storage Managers Arise!

You know better than I that storage these days is about a lot more than just tapes and disks. The job has gotten a lot more complicated, a lot more crucial to the enterprise, and -- I hope -- a lot more interesting. The pressure is on, and maybe someday the pay will follow (joke).

No longer can an IT administrator or storage manager just add more tapes and disks, and sort of know where to find things. The issues and challenges and new technologies have become much too important. All of the slick new applications and services that companies are introducing internally and externally rely on instant access to data -- data that you are responsible for storing and retrieving.

And that's just the opening act. Let's not forget issues like data center sprawl, the cost of powering and cooling data centers, the growing importance of backing up and archiving data, the ability to quickly produce anything from an entire database to an email thread in response to a lawsuit to a single financial transaction. Do you want to be responsible for your company getting hit with a big fine because you couldn't produce thousands of emails from five years ago in a few days, or maybe even see your CEO go to jail for that same reason (don't answer that one out loud).

And then there are the new technologies, strategies, and tactics the vendors and consultants and analysts are pushing to adopt -- yesterday. Do you know everything you need to know about virtualization? About spin-down disks? About e-discovery? About security, continuous data protection, data de-duplication, and global storage management?

If you don't now, you better soon -- your job depends on it.All of this is a long-winded way of introducing myself as the new site editor of Byte and Switch. After nearly 15 years as a news editor at InformationWeek, the magazine and Website, I have been given the job of enhancing the site so it is more useful to those of you who face the challenge of managing a growing amount of data in an efficient and economical way. I hope to talk to many of you during the next several months and learn your pain points and what keeps you up at night. I want to learn what has worked for you -- and what hasn't worked -- and share those lessons with your counterparts.

We want to make Byte and Switch the place where you can find answers and guidance to help you overcome and conquer the difficult challenges you face everyday, and perhaps also to provide some advice on how to convince those above you on the food chain to look at you and your job in a different light. We want you to get the respect (and the paycheck) you deserve. So look for more case studies and expert opinions, more analysis of product and technology trends, and more insights into the job of being a storage manager.

We'll also give you access to the impressive library of reports and research from our sister publication InformationWeek, starting off with a roundup of reporting and analysis from VMworld (registration required).

This is an exciting time for the storage industry, and I am pleased to be part of it. Send me your thoughts and suggestions for how we can serve you better, and I promise to read each one.