Contact & About

Contact
Please contact me by email. Or we can talk over the Comments.

About StorageMojo and Robin Harris
StorageMojo is published by TechnoQWAN LLC which was founded by me, Robin Harris, in 2006 as an independent analysis and consultancy focused on emerging IT technologies, products and markets. My blogs, StorageMojo and Storage Bits at ZDnet are ranked 10th and 11th out of 400 IT analyst blogs and have been linked to from the Wall Street Journal, All Things Digital, e-Week, ComputerWorld and hundreds of other sites.

My focus is on emerging technologies and products in the marketplace. Honed by 3 decades of experience in storage, servers and networks, my work combines architecture, engineering, marketing and psychology to analyze and predict market evolution. I envision a digital storage infrastructure that is safer and more reliable than paper – with far greater density, economy and accessibility.

Educated at Yale University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, I live in Sedona, Arizona with over 20 TB of data storage.

About StorageMojo.com
Storagemojo is devoted to data-storage and related topics. The topics reflect my interests: future technology, enterprise, SMB, SOHO, storage networks, SSDs, marketing strategy and technology diffusion.

I have a particular point of view about data storage, borne of several ideas:

  • Storage is important, a fundamental enabler of civilization. Until the invention of writing (“stored speech”) any person’s influence was limited to the range of their voice and the memory of listeners. Writing enabled civilization. Digital storage enables digital civilization. Storage is worth doing well.
  • The storage industry needs help. Storage is a victim of its own success: the RAID paradigm was wildly successful, and has now run out of gas. We need something new. I enjoy looking for those new things that could or should be elements in the future of storage.
  • There are some huge tectonic shifts waiting to happen, ala the Innovator’s Dilemma. Smarter hard drives, scale-out infrastructures, standards-based storage management, flash and other solid state storage and more will remake the face of storage in the next decade.

I’d like your help to make that happen. You can help by commenting on the articles and referring others to this site. Please write to me with suggestions for other topics. Thanks!

About Me
I’ve been selling and marketing data storage for over 20 years in both large companies and small. I’ve introduced a couple of multi-billion dollar storage products (DLT, the first Fibre Channel array) to market, as well as a couple of dozen smaller ones.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the most brilliant engineers in storage. I understand the reality of product development cycles and what that can mean for customers. While storage piqued my interest early on, I also spent 10 years marketing servers and networks.

My focus is technology in the market. There is a lot of great technology. Yet great technology with average marketing usually loses out to average technology with great marketing. Thus I am just as likely to comment on a company’s marketing as its technology.

Ethics
No one pays me to write for StorageMojo.com. I disclose financial relationships with companies I write about so you can judge for yourself what bias I may have.

I do not sign Non-Disclosure Agreements with companies unless they are related to work I am doing for the company. Having presented hundreds of NDA’s myself, I’d rather just look at the products and other data and make up my own mind about what they are doing right now. I’ve also found that the information presented under NDAs is, due to the nature of the technology engineering, often wrong.

Briefings are welcome as time and interest allow. I do honor embargo requests if they aren’t more than a couple of weeks.

Comments
Due to comment spam and the sometimes personal nature of comments, all comments are moderated. We get all kinds of people at StorageMojo ranging from newbies to the brilliant – for example, the late, great Jim Gray. I don’t want people to be put off from commenting because they might get flamed.

Strong disagreement is fine — sometimes I violently disagree with myself — but please be civil. I reserve the right to edit comments to remove personal, hostile or aggressive content – but I prefer that you save me the trouble. Thanks!

Anonymous comments that flame a vendor aren’t published either. If you’ve had a bad experience with a vendor that you want to share, include your name. Vendors read StorageMojo and usually will try to make things right.

Money
I make money from the ads on this site as well as analyst work, coaching and consulting. If you like what I do please support those who advertise on this site. If you like how I think as exemplified by my writing, email me, especially if your goal is to upset the status quo.

If you’d like me to get a deeper appreciation of your company or technology the surest route is to engage me to work with you on a project or on an ongoing consulting basis. Please note that this doesn’t mean you’ll get coverage on StorageMojo – I don’t sell blog posts – but I do write about stuff I think is cool. Knowing about the cool stuff is the 1st step.

Other Writings
Storage isn’t the only thing I think about. I also write reviews of books and technologies. Here are some samples: