On March 29, 2006, StorageMojo.com published its first posts to universal indifference. The indifference didn’t last long: the second week of StorageMojo’s existence I published 25x Data Compression Made Simple. The post was /.’d and the vituperation rolled in claiming no such thing was possible: over 400 mostly negative comments on /. and dozens more on StorageMojo.
It was enlightening – and encouraging – to see how wrong hundreds of techies could be about storage. Of course now we call it deduplication, not compression.
In May, StorageMojo started publishing vendor price lists. That raised a few hackles over the years, but was extremely popular with readers.
May’s Google File System Eval eventually went viral as well, a few months later. That month also saw ZFS: Threat or Menace? published.
Then in March 2007, I made fun of EMC’s Chuck Hollis for his non-response to StorageMojo’s Open Letter to Seagate, Hitachi GST, EMC, HP, NetApp, IBM and Sun. The open letter encouraged vendors to come clean about disk reliability based on the studies behind Everything You Know About Disks is Wrong, another viral post.
After twitting Chuck, 3 weeks later an EMC lawyer threatened StorageMojo, claiming that the EMC price list I’d published was a trade secret. It wasn’t, of course, and I’ve always wondered why a corporate lawyer nearing retirement made such a foolish mistake, exposing EMC to ridicule as a heartless bully.
But EMC’s threat did wonders for StorageMojo’s street cred. Thanks guys!
The StorageMojo take
There’s many more adventures and changes I could write about. Instead, I plan to republish some of StorageMojo’s important posts over the next few weeks to celebrate the 10th birthday.
I’m also planning on revamping the site to make it responsive for mobile devices. Posting more frequently. And adding in a few price lists for hot product areas.
But one thing hasn’t changed. As StorageMojo said 10 years ago:
Storage is also a fundamental enabler of civilization. Humans have been speaking for hundreds of thousands of years, but until the invention of writing any one person’s influence was limited to the range of their voice. Writing, or as I like to see it, the persistent storage of verbal data, enabled civilization. Modern digital storage enables digital civilization. It must be done well to preserve and extend that civilization.
That is even more obviously true today than it was 10 years ago. I hope to keep following the progress of the storage industry with a continuing focus on emerging technologies, products, companies and markets.
And perhaps I’ll be marking StorageMojo’s 20th anniversary in 2026.
Courteous comments welcome, of course.
Congratulations, and Happy Birthday!! I love your content, your insights, and the often brilliant exchanges in the comments section.
Hey Robin, congrats on a 10th anniversary! It’s a long road, but worth traveling 🙂
I think that if you and I would have a deep conversation on the shape and structure of storage tech today, we’d find more common ground than not.
Cloud is changing everything — including how we think about storage.
Best wishes!
— Chuck
Chuck, thank you for the gracious note. Perhaps we should have that conversation, as I’d like to learn what you’ve learned since you left EMC/VMware.
Robin
Hi Robin,
Congrats on the milestone. Looking forward to many insightful notes from you.
Belated Congrats!
I’m going to borrowing this one for a presentation – with attribution of course!
“Storage is … a fundamental enabler of civilization.” Robin Harris, Storage Mojo, 2006
So what kind of civilization are we building for the next generation?
Douglas,
We’ll have a better idea after the November election, won’t we?
Robin