I had an altogether different idea for the follow-on to my initial blog post, but decided to go in a more entertaining direction. We’ll explore object-based storage in an upcoming article. This one is just for fun.
It’s often been a challenge to explain to “laymen” (folks not in the storage/tech biz) what I do. I mean, there are a lot of people not in the industry and their experience with storage is based on the hard drive capacity of their PC. When I talk about Petabytes, content/objects or storage clusters their eyes glaze over. Yeah, like some of yours might have just done.
So, when recent dinner conversation turned in this direction and a physician was asking me about my job, I took a little different tact. The story started off by describing “digital stuff”. You know, all that stuff one creates on their home system like e-mail, photos, audio, video, documents, graphics. Stuff. Digital stuff. All this digital stuff needs to be stored somewhere. That’s why you have a hard drive. And when you collect too much stuff you need to get a bigger drive. Now this was resonating with my audience. Even the part about trying to find stuff in the big circular file cabinet, hard disk, hiding in some folder or sub-folder.
Since I wasn’t getting the deer-in-headlights expression, I pressed on. Today, people can take some of their digital stuff on the road, in their laptop. However, a lot of their stuff may be stored on an external drive at home, say a 1TB drive, so you can’t take all your stuff. Just some of it. Enter, social networking and cloud storage where you can store some of your stuff to the Web and access it from anywhere. Of course, you don’t put all your digital stuff out there either. The important thing is: you can still get to it, e.g. FaceBook, MySpace, etc. I was still getting knowing nods from my dinner companions and I knew I was onto something.
It struck me a few days later that this concept wasn’t anything new. I hadn’t suddenly hit on a ground breaking and simple explanation of storage and the problem of storing more digital stuff. I was simply channeling George Carlin (RIP). It was one of the first and funniest routines I saw him do and is so appropriate for drawing a real world analogy to the digital realm. If you haven’t seen it before or if you want to re-live his brilliance again you can read the routine here or watch it here. I recommend watching it, if for no other reason than taking a much needed break from the stresses of the day.
Stay tuned. Maybe I’ll post something on the “seven dirty words” in storage. Have to think on that one a bit.
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