A number of storage industry executives found themselves on the Hot Seat when president and editorial director of Network World John Gallant conducted a series of podcast interviews.

If you’re interested in storage technology and want to hear answers to some of the most challenging questions, listen to the podcasts:

1. "Storage resource management on the rise," featuring Onaro President and CEO Doug McNary. Onaro makes storage change management software. Gallant asks McNary to explain how the company’s software can provide end-to-end – application, server, storage – storage management.

2. "Cutting the cost of storage," featuring Bob Miller, CEO of OnStor, a vendor of network-attached storage clusters. They talk about how OnStor’s products can be used to consolidate storage.

3. "NetApp targets data security," featuring Manish Goel, vice president and general manager at Network Appliance, which acquired storage security vendor Decru in 2005. Goel talks about protecting customer data and complying with government regulations.

4. "Fixing the plumbing of storage," featuring Dave Ellard, senior vice president at Glasshouse, a storage consulting business. Ellard talks about the complexity of managing storage and how collecting data is "clogging the pipes."

5. "Protecting corporate data," featuring Tizor Systems' Prat Moghe. Tizor Systems wouldn’t normally be considered a storage company, but its appliance gives the customer real-time information about the data on their networks.

6. "Look ma, no tapes," featuring Sepaton’s CTO Miki Sandorfi. Sepaton is part of a burgeoning virtual tape library market that is populated by EMC, Network Appliance, Diligent and Data Domain, among others.

7. "Keeping insider information inside," featuring PortAuthority President and CEO Pete Foley. PortAuthority is in the business of protecting against data leakage, whether its with credit card numbers being lost or the protection of a company’s intellectual property.

8. "Better backup through virtual tapes," featuring Diligent CEO Doron Kempel. Kempel answers Gallant’s questions about data de-duplication and disk-based backup.