Read the latest columns from GlassHouse Technologies, Inc.:

"Patching storage"
"Beware the end of the lease"
"SAN optimization - Three areas to consider"
"Lifecycles, storage and management - Putting it together so it makes sense"
"Storage expenditures: Before you spend, determine goals and priorities"
"Are "tapeless" archives realistic?"
"Archiving pointers and practices "
"Storage virtualization: What it is, and how you will benefit from it"
"Will widespread adoption of the iSCSI protocol kill Fibre Channel?"

Richard Scannell is co-founder and Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy for GlassHouse Technologies, Inc., a storage services and consulting company. Richard is responsible for the development and execution of corporate strategy, intellectual property development, client relationship development and marketing.

Richard consults with executives and CIOs at Fortune 500 companies in the financial services, insurance, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical industries to develop storage strategies that meet corporate and regulatory goals for the preservation and availability of vital business data. Additionally, Richard has built relationships within the storage analyst community, as well as with leading vendors and emerging technology providers to ensure that GlassHouse consultants have access to new storage platforms and systems under development. This early-stage expertise allows GlassHouse to advise its clients as they develop storage strategies, implement data management technologies, and select vendors and systems.

Richard began his entrepreneurial career as President and COO of UpSource, a start-up company providing outsourced CRM services. He built a strong reputation as a leading end user of advanced IT technologies and services in more than 12 years of increasing responsibility managing IT systems for multinational giant Motorola. Richard headed a $30 million global IT organization supporting a $10 billion sector of Motorola with operations in Chicago and Scottsdale, AZ. He managed 160 IT engineers and ran a 24x7x365 operation with 25,000 sq. ft. of data center under his supervision, encompassing storage products from most all the major vendors in industry in SAN, NAS and DAS configurations. Richard had responsibility for 5-Nines Availability and Business Continuity initiatives in this role. Richard also served as Project Manager for an international CRM system deployment for Motorola, rolling the system out to 2,000 agents who supported 70,000 internal customers and over 100,000 transactions per week. In the early stage of his career, Richard held software engineering positions with Motorola and Ericsson.

GlassHouse Technologies is the industry's leading vendor-neutral, independent provider of storage services and consulting. The company does not sell hardware or software, instead working with end user clients to assess, develop and implement data storage and information management strategies that link the business value of data to the level and cost of the storage systems. GlassHouse also maintains consultative relationships with major storage hardware and software vendors, enabling the company to stay at the forefront of trends in storage systems and software. GlassHouse is headquartered in Framingham, MA, with regional operations in New York, Minnesota and Southern California.

Richard speaks frequently at key industry events such as Comdex and Storage Decisions, and is a featured columnist and thought leader in publications including STORAGE Magazine, Intelligent Enterprise and Byte and Switch. He holds a BSc. in Computer Science from University College Cork, Ireland.