"The network is the bottleneck!”, “Disk is too slow!”, “We are I/O bound!" If these phrases are things you normally hear or say, then how sure are you about that? Chances are the hardware, especially I/O, you are using is loafing along and it is possible to get much more out of it. Software and hardware change rapidly. Conventional wisdom must evolve to keep up and now is a good time to revisit old (and some new) ideas with new and different perspectives.