The Data Storage Saga: Retaining Data Then and Now

by bob weinstein

June 2, 2008

Storage technology has come a long way since the mainframe days. There have been plenty of changes, but it took almost 40 years for the technology to evolve. If you look at the history of the technology, you’ll see that it is an unfolding saga that has yet to reach a defining turning point. While it gets better and more efficient, new problems surface every year as the amount of data mushrooms. That means more technology, hardware and software – and equally important, more technology professionals, especially IT PMs, to implement, manage and maintain it.

Darrin Fritz, an applications engineer at IPLogic, Inc., a communications and data solutions company in Buffalo, N.Y., has witnessed most of the data storage changes that have taken place over the past five decades. From the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, large companies depended upon mainframes to handle all their storage needs, Fritz begins. “At small companies, data was stored on workstations, but there was no sharing of data because each workstation was autonomous and managed locally,” he says. “Each workstation required its own password and user name, which complicated managing hundreds of workstations at a single location.