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A New Storage View
Mark Bregman discusses the past, present, and future of storage technologies.

Today, storage is about more than simply saving data on a disk drive. Organizations recognize they must also manage their data so their employees can find the information they need, when and where they need it. Mark Bregman, Veritas Software's executive vice president of product operations, discusses the past, present, and future of storage technologies with Patrick Meader, .NET Magazine's editor in chief.

PM: You've been at Veritas just shy of a year now. What has been your most significant challenge since arriving at the company?

MB: The most significant challenge has simply been keeping up. I've been in the technology business my whole career, ranging from IBM to a startup with 40 people, where I had to install the coffee maker because there wasn't anyone else to do it.

And yet the pace at which we are moving in this segment of the industry is remarkable. I'm struck frequently by the conflicting sense I've got to follow up on that thing that we talked about a month ago and nothing's happening, and I find out it was really last Thursday. It felt like a month, how could so much have happened since then? That's one feeling.

Mark Bregman

The other feeling is, "Oh my God, we're not moving fast enough." It's remarkable, particularly compared to two or three years ago when the whole market was moving faster.

PM: Tell me about your long-term vision for storage over the next several years. Where do you see the general field of storage heading?

MB: For a long time, storage was viewed as a box-a storage box. To a large extent, that also meant that the producer of the storage box was viewed as the company you turned to for storage advice. But over the last couple years, things have changed. Think back: If you asked most people about storage even two years ago, they'd say, "Oh, you mean disk drives." Or, "You mean disk subsystems." Now they say, "You mean storage management." People are starting to get it, that it's more than just a box.

Take our friends in Redmond. Twenty or even 10 years ago, people who talked about PCs talked about the hardware: "Did you get an IBM system or a Zenith?" Now they say, "Is that a Windows box?" It's all about the software. I don't care who built the box; it's the software that's critical. The same thing is happening in storage.