* We look to the global readers of this newsletter for storage advice
Sometimes, where people store things is as interesting as what they store.
The other day, my editor shared some interesting information with me, a list of this newsletter’s readership based on geography.
Because my Friday mornings are mostly given over to correspondence with my readers, around here that day is sometimes referred to as “Pen Pal Friday,” and as more than 40% of my readership comes from outside North America, on Friday mornings I frequently have the pleasure of exchanging ideas with consultants, vendors and IT admins from all over the world.
Such contacts with overseas readers often remind me of many happy hours I have spent as a ham radio operator talking with people in exotic parts of the world. Well, at least they seemed exotic to me, although based on what my correspondents tell me, IT problems pretty much consist of the same set of mundane challenges worldwide. Still, thanks to the Internet one person’s backup window can be another’s exotica.
I note that my nearly 600 readers in India cope with the same set of problems as do the 74 Pakistanis who take my column. And so, I’m willing to bet, does that one reader in Equatorial Guinea.
Despite the fact that there are quite a few of them, I rarely hear from the South Koreans; still, I find it curious that on my readership list they are outnumbered by their North Korean brethren (I don’t hear from them at all).
I never knew there was much IT in Andorra, but I see that at a minimum there are eight admins there with enough time to read my column, or at least to let it clutter up their inboxes. I wonder if their IT experience differs much from that of my Vatican City readership, or if their workdays have lots in common with those 12 readers in Tanzania?
The biggest curiosity on my list is the fact that I have a subscriber on Bouvet Island, a remote locale famous to amateur radio operators and to no one else. This is a place in the south Indian Ocean off the coast of Antarctica that, if memory serves, is uninhabited except by seals, penguins and, perhaps for one week every few years, by someone stopping by to service an automated weather station. Getting beyond the fundamental question of why the IETF would assign a country code to Bouvet in the first place, we might ask ourselves what the IT challenges must be in such a location, and just what the terms of a “platinum level” service contract might be.
It is always good to have perspective.
Storage topologies, vendor differences, and geopolitics notwithstanding, there seems to be a certain universality about most IT challenges. I’m not sure what to make of that, except the obvious point that whatever your problem may be it’s likely that someone on the other side of the world is going through the same thing.
And so, “Nazil-siniz” to my Turkish readers, “Sawadi” to the Thais, “Jambo” to the Kenyans, “G’day” to the Aussies, “Merhaba” to the Omanis, and apologies to all the others I don’t have the space or language skills to mention. Feel free to write often and share your experiences.
As for the eight subscribers with the “.ATA” suffix on their e-mail addresses, well, I understand that for you cooling is unlikely to be a problem … but just how do you ensure the proper grounding of an electrical system in Antarctica?
