“Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.” — Margaret Thatcher

Zerowait’s clients come to us through a variety of sources, but they all expect integrity and a grasp of the complex issues relating to storage. Occasionally, our advice is contradictory to the manufacturer’s sales and engineering representatives comments they have recently heard. Typcially, this is because the manufacturer is looking at tactical sales goals, while we are looking to provide our customers with long term strategic storage advice to maximize their return on investment.

Looking at long term storage solutions presents an even greater challenge. The final paragraph of an article in this week’s Economist provide’s a perspective on what lies ahead for us:

Looking further ahead, the combination of databases, tagging and search will make it possible to navigate large numbers of documents in all kinds of radically new ways. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University, imagines searching using time and space axes: imagine picking New Haven, Connecticut, on a map and then zooming back to 1701 to see information about its founding. Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland has devised a new way to display search results in which data appear as concentrations of information in a “tree-map”: the colour, position and size of thousands of results can then be taken in at a glance. As folders fade away and search software evolves, it seems that we may, at last, be able to find what we’re looking for when we need it. With the death of the folder, perhaps we can finally get some work done