It's very hard for some people to see and understand digital storage, in terms of capacity, redundancy, and reliability. Physical storage is very visual and ver

It's very hard for some people to see and understand digital storage, in terms of capacity, redundancy, and reliability. Physical storage is very visual and very easy to understand: You put crud in a room and it sits there until someone does something with it. One of the things I find nontechnical people tend to fail to understand is the importance of organizing and cleaning up data. Often when we are running out of space, I get asked why we can't just buy another hard drive at Best Buy for $50. Then when people do clean up their data, they don't understand file space. They'll spend hours cleaning up old Word documents, but not touch the decade-old AVI video files which could at least be stored in a better format. Ask a government entity to buy a SAN, they complain. Ask them to buy a backup storage appliance, they ask why we need another SAN. And then in five years, they ask why you need another SAN if you bought one five years ago...