SNOW Fun and Information Technology – They Do Mix

In the spirit of the holidays (which ever holidays you prefer), here’s a bit lighter posting (rest assured, there are plenty of upcoming more technology focused postings in the works) about what many folks in the northern hemisphere are either dreading and dealing with, or, enjoying this time of the year and that is SNOW.

From the deserts of Las Vegas NV to New England, from Canada to Texas and most points in between and that’s just in the U.S., its that time of the year for SNOW (while friends from Oz remind me its summer down under this time of the year).

Holiday HoundsGreg snow sleedingNetworking in the SnowLittle Leo having a SNOW snackGreg walking on "Frozen" waterGreg and Friends Sleeding and Riding on Snowplow

With that in mind and knowing how IT or other tech savvy folks enjoy or depend on the use of acronyms, buzzwords and so forth, here are some reworked terms in the spirit of the northern hemisphere winter season. You might want to down load "Valley Winter Song" (e.g. the song from the LL Bean commercials) rom Fountains Of Wayne via Amazon.com or some other venue if you have not done so to enjoy with your snow or working on your holiday shopping list.

Some acronyms include among others:

  • Backup Target – Where a lot of shoppers are waiting in line or stuck in traffic
  • Backup – Getting out of a snow bank, stuck in traffic, what the snow plows do sometimes
  • Battery backup – Spare or extra batteries to put into all of those new toys and gadgets
  • BC – Before Cold sets in
  • Best practices – How to use the snow removable equipment
  • Bus driver – person driving the metric transit bus full of holiday shoppers and revelers
  • Capacity planning – figuring out where to pile up the snow
  • Chain of events – Car driver on cell phone, Car hits ice, car slides into another car, chain reaction accident
  • Cloud – where the snow comes from
  • Cluster – Many cars piled up together stuck in traffic, nothing moving, see gridlock
  • Compress – Pile the snow up, let it settle
  • DAS – Direct Attached Snowplow
  • DR – Doctor to go see for your cold or back ache from shoveling snow or too much holiday cheer
  • Fibre Channel – How to get the weather channel on local cable
  • Global warming – What those dealing with snow might like to see a bit of right now
  • Generator – Essential equipment for geek’s and techno folks
  • Green – What the snow is now covering on the golf courses in much of the northern hemisphere colder areas
  • Grid – how the traffic highways are plugged with stopped cars and holiday shoppers
  • Grid lock – Encryption and security for grids or traffic jams
  • Hardware- Snow removable equipment
  • ILM – iPhone Loves Multimedia
  • InfiniBand – Giant bow around holiday presents
  • iPhone – I will call you latter
  • iSCSI – What some are referring to the slippery and dirty roads today
  • MSP – Managed snow removal professionals, or the Minneapolis / St. Paul Airport where holiday travelers may be stranded
  • Need Another Shovel (NAS)
  • Networking – Talking with your neighbors
  • NFS – Nevada Fresh Snow
  • North pole – Future location for Google to keep their storage and reduce cooling costs
  • Offline – Power outage or, snow plow gets stuck
  • Offsite – where the snow gets moved too
  • Online – where most snow bound holiday shoppers should be shopping instead of being stuck in the snow
  • Optics – Evening light shows during holiday parades
  • Outsourcing – Have someone else remove the snow
  • PC ? Payment Card
  • PCI – Payment card industry that is busy this time of the year processing credit card transactions
  • POS – Point of sale, plain old shovel
  • Provisioning – going to the store and stocking up on food, fuel and other essentials
  • RAID – Remove All Ice Daily
  • RAIN – Snow before it freezes
  • Removable Media – Chasing the news crew off your property after the nightly light show
  • Replication – Repeated snow storms in a row
  • ROI – Remove old Ice
  • SAS = Sleds and Snow
  • SANd = Stuff at the beach in the summer, stuff on the road in the winter time
  • SPAMHormel product
  • SATA – Santa without an "n"
  • Shipping tapes – How 3M gets tape from their factories to you for gift wrapping
  • Single instance – Rare snowstorm like what happened in Las Vegas
  • SLED – snow sled with a disk Dedupe – Let the snow piles shrink
  • Slide ware – Picture on the wall of a nice tropical warm place while the snowstorm is outside
  • Snapshot – Picture of the snow on a tree Restore – When the power comes back on
  • SNOW – Storage Networking Organizations West or, Storage Networking outsource World
  • Software – What goes in the Wii or play station during a snowstorm (if you have power)
  • Spanning tree – very big tree with lots of snow on it
  • SRM – Snow removable management, or, Sunday Rolls into Monday
  • Standby power – Waiting on the phone for the power company to answer during an outage
  • Tape – What 3M makes to wrap presents with
  • Tiered servers – Wait staff at a restraunt
  • Tiered storage – How snow is piled to maximize space
  • Tweet – What takes place on twitter or perhaps from eating too much sweets
  • UPS – The people in the brown trucks bringing things from Amazon and others
  • Snow plow offlineSnow plowingSnow and cold family

    Have a safe and happy holiday season and enjoy the snow while you can.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

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