The storage industry, however, long ago transcended Moore’s Law, with new hardware components, systems, software and services being developed at a pace unmatched in any industry. Hard drives with capacities of 3TBs? Storage appliances that can scale capacity to infinity? Good old-fashioned -- and cheap -- IP networks replacing high-speed Fibre Channel and InfiniBand? Things that would have seemed impossible five years ago are now commonplace. None of this would have been possible without the early realization that the cost of raw storage capacity would start approaching free, and the vision that new ways to store, back up, retrieve, archive and, above all, manage users’ and companies’ data would be required.

Enter the storage visionaries. This group of talented individuals -- some of the smartest people on the planet -- live and breathe storage. They protect, nurture and grow the storage on which business, academia, industry and entertainment thrive.