Top 10 network storage blogs

When you're immersed in storage as I am, it’s impossible to ignore the blogs of analysts, vendors and consultants. The blogs written by storage company executives can be surprisingly vendor-agnostic, though the analysts and consultants still tend to pull fewer punches. Here are the 10 best I've come across -- though with the rate at which new blogs pop up, it will probably be time to revisit this list before long.

Dave’s Blog
Dave Hitz founded Network Appliance in 1992 and is currently executive vice president, responsible for strategy and future direction of the storage-area network and network-attached storage (SAN/NAS) company. Hitz blogs about everything from NetApp’s financial results in the last quarter ("Why NetApp's Earnings Results Last Quarter Frustrated Me") to how VMware is changing the data center, to fellow blogger and EMC executive Mark Lewis.

Hu Yoshida’s Blog
Hu Yoshida is CTO of Hitachi Data Systems. He blogs on 20-year-old storage architectures, storage performance, and capacity and utilization. His blog is one of the longest running. It's always interesting to read, if only to catch up on what’s happening in other people’s blogs.

Mark's Blog
Mark Lewis, executive vice president and chief development officer at EMC, is writing one of the newest and most useful and entertaining blogs about storage, even if it is EMC-style. Headlines on recent entries include: "Don't name your farm animals" and "The toughest job."

Steve’s IT Rants
Steve Duplessie, senior storage analyst and founder of the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), writes a no-holds-barred, equal-opportunity-offender blog on whatever in storage interests him: data loss, Brocade’s stock-backdating troubles or EMC’s recent reorganization, for example. Here's a recent snippet: " 'Can you believe my board is actually complaining that we're profitable?' This was the question I was asked over dinner with a storage industry CEO last week. I can't name him because there are forces on his board who, while clearly moronic, may be able to read." On Duplessie's blog, you’ll find links to his ESG colleagues' blogs as well.

StorageMojo
Storage consultant Robin Harris is a former Sun employee. This blog is the most frequently updated of the bunch and covers the widest variety of topics.

Inside System Storage
Tony Pearson is the manager of brand marketing strategy for IBM System Storage. He blogs about file-area networks, information life-cycle management for iPods, where the storage industry is headed, and how Aperi is Viagra for the Storage Management Interface Specification.

Storage Thoughts
Ken Gibson is a past director of storage engineering at Sun. He writes about how iSCSI is good for now, who is using object-based storage and the performance of NAS vs. SAN systems.

DrunkenData.com
Outspoken analyst Jon Toigo opines on a host of storage and data management topics, though I'm still not entirely sure why he chose to name the blog what he did. Toigo boasts that already this year he "wrote something like 800 articles/columns in the trade press — some of them pretty good." Topics on the blog range from Microsoft’s Unified Data Storage Server, to the IP wars, to data archiving.