Traveling Terabytes & Jim Gray

TG Daily is reporting about a New Jersey network engineer is sending digital care packages to troops. The packages are media-filled hard-drives, cables, and international power adapters, packaged in very appropriate Pelican cases. These packages are intended to continue "traveling," with the recipient encouraged to add-to and forward the package.

This idea seems to be hit, and reminds me of the work of the great Jim Gray (wikipedia entry), who (among many other contributions) suggested the efficiency of sending data in the mail thanks to the small size and increasing capacities of hard drives. He was very accurate, prescient, and is sorely missed. It saddens me more to think of how many people outside the research and academic worlds must not realize how much our digital world owes to him.

If you don't know of his work, consider the following. Every time you use a modern database, every time you you use an online map, or an online telescope. You are using systems and ideas that Jim brought into this world. And in saying that, I probably fall short of doing him justice.



Jim was helped set the Internet2 Land Speed Record, and yet was still able to envision the use of commodity drives as Storage Bricks. I find it impressive that he could consider such cutting edge projects and not lose sight of the practical nature of sneakernet, but to embrace it where appropriate and extend it to include the idea of mailing commodity PCs packed with disk when necessary (treating a NAS server as a "removable media" :)

Thank you, Jim, we miss you.