IBM's premier research laboratory in the United Kingdom had created an exciting new disk technology, with great performance, but with no product to manage it, there were major customer issues. Each disk configuration was connected via one or more cables, each less than a quarter of an inch in diameter. Some clients had so many disks that the trunk of cables was over six feet around. If a cable was defective, which one should be replaced? That was the challenge.

Mr. Knight's first step was to work with customers & outline a product that would allow the disk configurations to be visualized, monitored, and managed on a PC. The product included low-level device driver code that would analyze the disk configurations, and make that information available to a mapping & control program running on remote PCs. This design allowed a disk cluster to be managed either by the customer, or by IBM remotely. The product was called StorX, and was a big success, removing the barriers for the volume sales of the new storage system.

IBM then called on Mr. Knight to create a similar product, but this time for Fibre Channel attached storage. However, this presented a whole new challenge. StorX relied on access to IBM specific data structures in the device drivers. It was a challenge to keep up with changes to those data structures, but a Fibre Channel product would have to manage hardware from many vendors, not just IBM, making access to that information completely unreliable. Examining the existing Fibre Channel industry standards showed that the relevant information was simply not available.

Mr. Knight solved this problem by creating what he called a "Binary pass-through" for the HBA controllers. This allowed a program running in the user space to format any Fibre Channel command into a buffer, and pass it through the Fibre Channel controller "invisibly". This allowed a wealth of information that was previously inaccessable, to be gathered by the management program, thus allowing comprehensive management of any vendor's hardware. He patented this invention, then released it to the industry through SNIA, and it is now an integral part of the SNIA HBA spec.

Again, consulting with customers, Mr. Knight transformed the early designs of the product from a passive monitoring product, to a proactive management product, by introducing simple metrics, and allowing them to trigger a policy engine. These features helped make many sales. The product was called "TSNM - Tivoli SAN Network Manager", and brought in over $40Million in sales in the first 5 months alone.