CTR Renders The Whole Storage Picture.

Last month, a subscriber wrote the following email to the publisher of Computer Technology Review: "When I first subscribed to your magazine you covered a lot more interesting technologies and innovations. Now everything is just storage, storage, storage. I'm sick of storage. Storage is a dime a dozen. You just stack it up like building blocks. You need more storage, you stack up more blocks. I'm not going to re-subscribe. Sorry."

Neither this subscriber nor anyone else pays money for his subscription. CTR has what's called "controlled" circulation, which means that if a reader is in a business that our advertisers want to reach, we send them CTR for free. If they choose to drop their subscription, they can simply say so on (or ignore) the "qualification" form that we wrap around our issues periodically.

So it's surprising to get a letter like this. When our publisher forwarded it to me, I thought it deserved a response. Why should we risk losing even one (free!) subscriber without making an effort to draw him back? And maybe there are others, out there, who are also "sick of storage"? So, omitting only the salutation, this is what I wrote:

I can see how it might seem that storage, today, is just another commodity in the computer industry. As you say, if you need more of it, you can almost literally stack up devices upon devices, like a child playing with blocks. But if you will consider, for a moment, what goes into making those "blocks" so apparently easy to use, you may decide you're not really "sick of storage" after all.

Someone has to determine your needs--what you need today, and what you'll need a year or so ahead--just to see if their product lines are (or are capable of) meeting those needs. There's an art to that, and more than a little risk too; some previously top-ranked storage companies have folded after betting wrong on the marketplace.

Then the research and development people take over. R&D may start out being purely theoretical, but the people who do it soon take on physical tasks in earnest: expanding capacity, speeding up transfer rates, making connections to the latest "pipes," getting systems to draw fewer amps and run cooler, or perhaps just squeezing everything down into smaller and smaller boxes.

Then comes the real test--the one that will ultimately make or break the company: actually building the new thing on a factory floor. A storage device, however fabulous on the laboratory bench, is chopped liver if it can't be mass-produced.

Finally, it has to be installed in a user's system. That's where the OEMs come in: the people who order storage devices by the carload. And the VARs: the ones who ensure that those devices actually work on site. And the users: the people whose data--in some cases, even, whose lives--depend on consistent access to reliable storage devices.

What we do at Computer Technology Review is give our readers the whole storage picture--not just the marketing or the R&D or the fabrication or the installation but the entire process, end to end. As journalists, storage has been our exclusive "beat" for many years, and we pride ourselves on having made CTR the leading source of inside information about storage across the entire computer industry.

If we writers and editors don't cover "a lot more interesting technologies and innovations," it's because we can't. There are plenty of publications, both in the computer industry and in the general science press, that cover storage once in a while. But they're generalists, while we're specialists. The fact is: nobody else focuses in on storage--the whole storage picture--except us.

Moreover, we publish once a month, so we can't compete for "breaking news" against the big weekly publications. And we're not owned by a media conglomerate with a dozen high-tech publications from which to borrow stories; so we can't expand our coverage into other "beats," such as gaming or Linux or telecom.

Nope. Storage is our beat, and we like it. Frankly, we're experts: after so many years of covering the storage beat, we are as informed on the subject as any analyst or consultant working today. And with your subscription to CTR, you get our insights free of charge!

Now, if you don't have to know where the storage industry is going anymore, or if your business can get along fine without anybody drilling this deep into the subject on your behalf, well, there's nothing we can do about that. It was nice having you with us for a while, and we wish you well. Maybe once in a while there'll be a useful story in CTR; but if you don't at least keep it coming, and check it out--even just to glance through it--you'll never know if you've missed something important.

What more can we say? If ever you want or need to know what goes on inside the storage industry, then come on back. You won't find what we've got for you anywhere else.