A World of Unlimited Storage

The creative, inner IT person in me can think of other ways to use that extra petabyte of storage we'll soon have at our disposal.

• By Em C. Pea
• 07/01/2004

Auntie doesn't know about you, but I've got one of those closets here. You know, the one with the half-dozen old PCs stacked in the back that I can't bear to part with even though P-166 towers are about $25 each on eBay, as well as old magazines, books on Pascal programming, and the pom poms from her high-school cheerleading career (brown and gold in honor of our team: the Cicadas). Just last week I was trying to cram in one more dead (but fixable!) monitor, and dear Fabio happened to remark that what I needed was a closet with unlimited storage space.

Well, we don't have that sort of storage for things made out of atoms yet, but we're sure getting there for things made out of bits. You're as aware as I am of the plummeting price and increasing size of hard drive storage, to the point where we can fit terabytes in tidy boxes and those of us on the bleeding edge are thinking about portable petabytes. So far, though, the proposed uses of all this storage strike this brainstorming gal as rather uninspired. Everyone wants to cram all the songs and movies they've ever experienced into the next portable device. Microsoft makes noises about recording all the details of every meeting you've ever been in (as if there were no meetings that I'd like to forget) or even of your entire life (so you could then spend another life reliving it, I guess). Surely as MCSEs, we can come up with better uses for practically unlimited storage.

For starters, how about saving nightly snapshots of the hard drive of every user in your organization? No, not for backups; we've all got strategies for backing up data files already. But imagine the satisfaction from being able to say, "Well, actually, you did change something. Back here on August 3rd you installed the latest shoot-'em-up software in what you thought was a hidden directory, and it destroyed the approved video drivers." No more whining from users insisting that the software just broke for no reason at all. Or at least no more need to put up with it. But remember, if you're going to rub people's noses in their own mistakes, you should not pick the people who sign your paycheck.

Then, why not mirror the entire Internet to a local server? Set a Web spider or six to hunting around and grabbing every page you could possibly need from out there. That way, when you need support information, you won't have to wait for the time-consuming process of downloading it. Every Knowledge Base article and hardware driver you could ever need will be right there in your own office, along with, um, everything else. Just make sure you don't put the mirror server itself on the Internet. That would create an infinite regress and probably suck us all into a black hole.

Finally, there's a boon lurking here for network security. You may already be using an application such as Snort to watch for dangerous traffic on your network; such intrusion detection software is becoming increasingly popular. But this software will only find attacks that you know about in advance. What do you do when a new vulnerability is revealed and you don't know if your servers were hit or not? Well, in the future, you can just store all of the network traffic that crosses the router to the Internet, so you can go back and analyze it at your leisure. But perhaps you'd better not tell your boss about this one, lest you be subject to pressures to determine exactly which employees have been spending time in chat rooms or looking at forbidden Web sites.

Of course, there's another problem with that closet beyond its lack of storage space. Already Auntie has so much stored in there that she can never find anything when she's looking for it. So when you're bolting all those extra NAS servers on to your network, keep an eye out for good indexing software. You're going to need it.