10 Storage Experts You Need to Follow

Industry heavyweights share their thoughts about the storage market in 2012, as well as predictions for this year.

When you want storage information and don’t want to sift through your thousands of followers on Twitter, just check the feeds of those in the following list. InfoStor did the dirty work for you and found the top individuals you should follow for the latest and greatest news and insights in the storage industry.

Many of the experts on our list have founded their own companies and are extremely active in the industry. Whether they’re blogging, tweeting or speaking at industry conferences, these individuals will keep you in the know.

1. Ben Kepes, @benkepes, focuses on how cloud computing enables more flexibility in working environments. He speaks at conferences and events worldwide as a member of Clouderati.  He has been the director of Diversity Limited for the last ten years where he works with investing, advising, and consulting.

2. Cormac Hogan, @CormacJHogan, is a corporate storage architect in the storage and availability business unit at VMware. His expertise as a technical support escalation engineer has enabled him to develop training materials, write many white papers and be a key speaker on storage best practices.

3. Curtis Preston, @wcpreston, is an independent writer, speaker and consultant for end user companies through his website called TruthinIT.com.  Preston started his own company in 2001 called The Storage Group which was bought out in 2004.  He is a backup and recovery systems expert who has written three books on this subject.

4. Dana Gardner, @Dana_Gardner, an industry analyst since 1999, is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Interarbor Solutions is a research and advisory company focusing on trends in service oriented architecture (SOA). In 2001 and 2002, Technology Marketing magazine named Gardner a "Top Industry Influencer" for IT industry analysts.

5. David Linthicum, @DavidLinthicum, founded Blue Mountain, a cloud computing consulting and advisory firm, which was acquired by Bick Ventures. He is currently the SVP at Cloud Technology Partners.  He has authored and coauthored thirteen books focusing on computing. In the last several years he has been most enthusiastic about the technology of cloud computing, focusing on how the modern enterprise can work with cloud computing.

6. Greg Ness, @Archimedius, blogs about everything from virtualization to security and more. If you look at his most recent posts, you’ll find he’s passionate about cloud computing.  Ness currently works at a cloud automation startup in Silicon Valley.  His recent Twitter activity has interviews of him discussing why cloud will crush traditional disaster recovery.  

7. Greg Schulz, @storageio, a vExpert for many years, founded StorageIO in 2006 and is currently a senior advisor there. He has written three books on data infrastructure and is also an expert in servers. Schulz's tweets demonstrate his expertise in the storage sector.

8. Kevin Jackson, @Kevin_Jackson, has been involved in the tech industry for over fifteen years. He founded his own company, GovCloud Network, which provides IT consulting services to government and commercial customers. He also published a book titled GovCloud: Cloud Computing for the Business of Government.

9. Roman Stanek, @RomanStanek, has founded three companies in his career, GoodData, NetBeans and Systinet. Currently, he is the CEO at GoodData, which utilizes cloud computing to provide valuable business intelligence insights. NetBeans and Systinet have been acquired and are now owned by Oracle and HP, respectively. Stanek tweeted about his debate on VentureBeat "Can 'big data' lift people out of cycles of debt? "

10. Stuart Miniman, @stu, is a principal research contributor for Wikibon.  Miniman is an active member in networking, virtualization, and cloud communities.  Check out some of his research on Server SAN.

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