But I wonder if George and Brad know just how awesome the SL8500 actually is. Do they know, for example, an SL8500 can hold a petabyte of data - about two hundred thousand copies of their Oceans Thirteen movie? Do they know that if the Bank Casino used 1000 cameras to gather their surveillance data and stored that data for 30 days, they would fill the tapes in an SL8500? And in interests of saving the planet, do they know tape is about 25 times less expensive to power and cool than disk because it uses that much less energy? All great news for the IT budget and the planet.

I spent some time this week with our Media and Entertainment sales team - to say the data in M&E is exploding is a complete understatement. One customer digitizing TV shows is expecting to have 50 petabytes of metadata to enable all the searches they need to handle - never mind the raw entertainment itself! And the M&E industry is heading full steam ahead into complete digitization, consumer mashups, affiliate communities... Data, data, and more data. No wonder why many cool web sites are using SL8500s to help store that data.

So, sure Brad and George were cast for the Ocean's movies because they're so hip, but our SL8500 certainly fit right in with the Ocean gang on their latest caper.

Check out the Big is Bad emblem on the tow-hitch - a perfect statement. But this big bad thumper isn't nearly as eco-responsible as our hybrid data storage server at Sun. Our x4500 data storage server holds 24 TB of data in a 4U of rack space, starting at $2/GB. A data storage server that can run any application - right on the storage system itself!

We're building new storage systems like this just because there's too much data in the world. Too much to just shove away on a block storage device and forget about. Too much to simply spool to a tape and ship offsite. Data today matters to more and more people over longer and longer periods of time. Data that has to be accessible when it's needed. You know what that means? It's not so much about how you store it - sure there are tons of options for disk and tape to meet your performance, reliability, scale, etc needs - its really about the applications you use to retrieve it for use again and again...