The Cloud Blog

It was a great game — an annual family outing to watch our favorite baseball team in action.  This year we decided to see them play the Orioles at Camden Yards (Saturday 10/19).  Funny how it’s cheaper to see your home team as a visitor in somebody else’s venue, but that’s a topic for another post…  In any case, being the family-annointed video-and-photo journalist, I faithfully snapped the requisite pictures and captured the action in HD video.  We won 11-5 (Go Sox!).  Then I downloaded the content to our family’s server, and immediately lost a few gigabytes.

While a few gigabytes may seem inconsequential in today of 1 TB disks, it does add up (and in our case, quickly).  The shared home server already holds around 4TB leaving less than 2TB free.  Last year when the server went into “active duty,” only 1TB was used.  I think this closely parallels what many businesses are struggling with today.  While my server is becoming full of HD home videos, thousands of pictures, backups of the family’s laptops, the ever-growing iTunes collection, and a gazillion saved episodes of The Simpsons and South Park thanks to TiVo Desktop, businesses are facing the same challenges with PST files, rich business media, PowerPoints, Word docs, and so on.  All of this seems to fall into IDC’s definition of “Content Depot” – which they coined a year ago almost to the day. 

So while I have to figure out a strategy to manage my growing content — and fast — HDS has been figuring this out on behalf of our business users for some time.  There will be some interesting news to come in this space; stay tuned!