20
Server Software
On 5 January 1941, while flying from Blackpool to RAF Kidlington near Oxford, Amy Johnson1 went off course in poor weather and drowned after bailing out into the Thames Estuary. She was run over by the ship that was sent to her rescue.
It is assumed she lost her sense of direction, although an alternative theory is that she was shot down by the RAF after failing to provide correct identification. Glen Miller met a similar end (probably)2 when hit by a jettisoned bomb. Either way it's a telling illustration that it is easy to get lost in a cloud and not a great idea to rely on less than foolproof identification procedures.
January 2010 marked the 25th anniversary of the cellular industry in the UK and I helped to organise a great big party3 to help raise some funds for a new communications gallery at the Science Museum. The thing is that in an age of austerity it is not deemed politically correct to have a party unless you can prove the event was also informationally useful, which it was and to prove it I am going to crossreference some of the presentations from the predinner conference that have direct relevance to the topic of this chapter, server software. Two data points sourced from the Ericsson presentation4 highlighted some of the issues.
Every two years the number of voice and data sessions doubles. In 2009, more than four exabytes (four billion gigabytes) of unique information were created. This information has to be stored somewhere and only has value ...
