The passing of a storage guru

We have just received news that one of the storage gurus has passed away just recently. Tom Clark, a storage guru who was at Vixel and later Nishan Systems (which was acquired by McData), has left us and we are saddened by the news. The memory of him is at his blog.

I had the privilege to meet Tom in person in August of 2000 in Langkawi. He was an invited guest of Quantum ATL. He was still with Vixel then. I went up to him to thank him for his book. His book "Designing Storage Area Network" (first edition) helped me got my SNIA Certified Fibre Channel Professional later in the next year but the tiny little book with less than 250 pages helped me passed the exam in flying colours. One significant impact the book had on me was to understand storage from the application's characteristics point of view. This approach became the cornerstone of my consulting work in storage networking and data management, and I still practise it today.

We at Real Data Matrix, would like to pay our tribute to Tom Clark, a truly affable storage guru.