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This issue sees a plethora of opinions and bylines from some of the biggest and best known names in the storage industry, as well as some that will probably be new names to many of our readers. One recurring theme is the impact of Cloud computing, not just on storage infrastructures, but on security, on disaster recovery planning - right across the IT spectrum in fact.

Bill Andrews of ExaGrid suggests food for thought for any business considering backup to a public cloud service, including four 'big questions' that will need answering first. As he says: "For small businesses with under 500GB of data (and more likely 50GB of data) the public cloud may prove to be an effective offsite backup solution but it's certainly not a viable business option for corporations with larger backup requirements. The key question when making these choices is what will happen in the event of a disaster and how fast would the business need access to the data to survive that disaster."

Elsewhere Ralph Wynn of FalconStor discusses automated disaster recovery as a potential cure for 'data centre nightmares', while Yves de Montcheuil of Talend talks about Big Data strategies for small businesses. We have Panasas and IDC debating the future of High Performance Computing, and Nexsan's Gary Watson discusses how to build an appropriate protection architecture for your business. And there's lots more besides.

We also introduce a new feature concept to Storage magazine, the 'First Look' section, where we highlight some new product offerings that we think you might want to find out more about. We see these pieces as complementing our in depth Labs Test reviews, and giving some exposure to companies that once again may be new to many of our readers. This issue we look at a PBBA from Sepaton, and some remarkable file compression software from Balesio. I'd love to know what you think of this idea, so please let me know at the email address below.

David Tyler
david.tyler@btc.co.uk