Hi, I’m mfarley and I’m a storage geek. I’ve been in the network storage industry ever since the early 90’s when I worked for Palindrome, a Netware-oriented backup and recovery company. I wrote a couple books including Building Storage Networks (Osborne-McGraw-Hill) and Storage Networking Fundamentals (Cisco Press) that put me in the position of being some sort of storage expert – something that I’ve always been uncomfortable with. There’s simply too much to know and I don’t think any one person can be an expert about all this stuff. The thing I have been good at is articulating storage problems, solutions and architectures.
I started working with EqualLogic a couple years ago as a part of their corporate advisory board. Over time, I came to really like what they were doing and had the chance to speak with over 100 of their customers to see what they thought. The customer loyalty EqualLogic has really got my attention. Last year, I started considering going to work for one of the analyst companies where I could be part of a team and do my writing and analysis work with others and a sales staff with real office administration, as opposed to being a lone wolf. The whole thing looked very appealing after years of being sales, marketing, analyst, writer, accounting, and operations all in one. I was really, really close to making that decision, but I knew I wanted to talk to EqualLogic because I felt there were very special things going on there.
To be brief, it turns out that I got hired by EqualLogic to work on customer programs. Things like advisory boards, communities, forums, and this blog. I’m looking forward to carrying on blogosphere conversations with people about EqualLogic and other storage stuff that I find interesting. I hope the story that comes out of this will be interesting – sort of a chronicle of the trials and tribulations of being in a storage startup that introduces disruptive technology and a new business models and how the market reacts to it.
