Planning A Storage Strategy

About the Author

Randy Kerns is currently an independent storage analyst and consultant. Previously he was the Vice President of Strategy and Planning for the Data Management Group at Sun Microsystems.  He has over thirty years in the computer industry involved in the development of storage products for both mainframe and open systems and analysis of company strategies and product technologies.  His background is in product design and development in disk and tape systems as well as industry analysis.  Randy’s education includes a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Missouri at Rolla and a master’s degree in engineering computer science from the University of Colorado. 

Development and management history includes developing disk and tape systems for mainframe attachment at IBM and StorageTek, development of disk systems for attachment to open systems and proprietary computer platforms at Fujitsu and Tandem Computers, and tape and disk systems for both open systems and mainframes at two start-up companies. 

As an industry analyst, Randy was responsible for product analysis and company strategy evaluation at the Evaluator Group.  He also worked on projects with major end-user clients in assisting them with developing their storage strategies and with vendor companies in their product strategies.   In addition to the analysis and consulting, Randy wrote numerous online articles and served as one of the industry experts in answering technical and market questions.   

Randy has made numerous presentations at conferences and is the author of many industry articles and papers.