One way to appreciate the chaotic complexity that rules in the computer vaults ("datacentres") of firms is to imagine, with a bit of anthropomorphic licence, the journey of one lowly unit of digital information, or byte, as it wends its way on a routine mission through a maze of computers, routers, switches and wires. At the outset, the byte is asleep on a specialised storage disc. This disc could be made by a firm such as EMC or Hitachi. Now an alarm bell rings and a message flashes that an employee of the company, sitting in an office somewhere half-way round the world, has clicked on some button in his PC'S software. The byte wakes up and is ejected from its storage disc. Along with billions of other bytes from other storage discs, it is now herded through a tunnel called a storage switch. This switch is probably made by a company called Brocade or McData. It hurls the byte towards an "interface card", which comes from yet another vendor, and the card directs the byte into one of the datacentre's many back-office computers, called "servers".
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