I’ve been to a lot of technical conferences and this was one of the best. My first trip out of town in my new, used but new to me, car with iPod Pandora wired into an MP3 auxiliary port into the cars speakers (the first car I’ve had with this feature) was a great start and finish. Everything in between was top notch.

Exploding storage requirements are a fact of life. As Moore's law enables higher quality digital multimedia, we need to store more for longer. Keeping multiple systems updated with enough disk storage with RAID redundancy and backup eats up resources. The idea of a SAN (storage area network) is to provide a large pool of storage for many different needs. Economies of scale can be obtained by centralizing fast, redundant storage that can be flexibly parceled out to various systems over the network. Disk storage becomes a cloud resource over the network.