The day had finally arrived—SkyTech was sitting down with Charlie and Sean to discuss system options. The engineer, Phil, was all smiles. “Great to meet you, Charlie. You’ve built something pretty amazing here.”
Charlie smiled. “Thank you. We’re pretty proud of it. But we have some technical challenges, as I’m sure you’re aware, so I’d love to hear what you think.”
Kimberly handed him a printed packet. “That’s in your email, too, but I printed one for the meeting. The first page is a rough diagram of the network as you have it now. The second page shows the same network with an added switch and an additional hard drive. That allows more people to access at a higher speed, and you’ll have more room for files, which will also speed the system.”
“This isn’t half bad,” Charlie said. “I was expecting way more.”
“Turn to the next estimate,” Phil said. “That is the system we recommend.”
Charlie hissed at the number. “That’s more like what I thought I’d see.”
“And for good reason,” Phil said. “That is an EVO—a shared storage system with built in software to lock anyone from making changes to a file you’re working on. It also has asset management software that allows you to tag your project files with keywords so you can find them later, like your own search engine. It also means that digesting and rendering can be done in the background so you don’t lose time.”
Charlie whistled. “She sounds like a beaut, but that’s too rich for my blood.”
“That’s ok,” Kimberly said. “The switch—the one we suggested on that last estimate—that’s the same switch you need for the EVO, which means you can get a little better now and still save up for more without wasting money on something you plan to replace.”
“What about expanding the hard drive of the existing server? We’d eventually replace that,” Charlie asked.
“Yeah, but you might repurpose that as an archive when you upgrade the server,” said Phil
“I didn’t think of that,” Sean said. “If we were able to get all the files we don’t really need right now onto a separate system, we’d have more space on the server and it would stop lagging.”
“It will improve, I can say that,” Phil said. “But with the EVO, you can get a 16 bay and leave half of the bays empty so you have room to grow. With 8 active bays you would not only have ten times the storage space you currently have, you would also have ten times the speed, for all of you.”
Both Charlie and Sean made their own version of the “wow” sound effect—Charlie whistled and Sean clicked his tongue.