Interlude - Index of

Customers | 129
which produces even more terabytes, and then crunch all that
data down to a single bit of information: drill or don’t drill. (To
put the amount of data in context, one terabyte would hold
about two million copies of this book.) The military intelligence
community is similar, except that they take multi-terabyte
satellite photographs and crunch them down to a different
bit of information: bomb or don’t bomb. Hollywood studios
used our equipment to store animated movies like Ratatouille
and computerized special effects for movies like King Kong and
Transformers.
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Internet customers became especially important as the dot-com
boom progressed. At first they were like other technical customers.
System administrators from technology companies started
many of the early Internet companies as a hobby, because they
wanted to read newsgroups that weren’t allowed at work (not
only porn, although that was a factor). They installed equipment
in the garage and sold login privileges to friends to help cover
the costs. They naturally bought equipment that was familiar to
them: Sun computers, Cisco routers, and NetApp storage.
The requirements for Internet companies changed dramatically
when they realized that shutting down service for thousands
(later millions) of people would earn them front page
headlines. Suddenly their applications were mission critical—
they absolutely had to keep working 100 percent of the time.
Often they’d fire their first CEO and hire one with experience
making things very reliable, like someone from a telephone
company. Even though they were start-ups, they wanted the