About 15 years ago I gave an application performance presentation to some storage guys. Since I was a database jock at the time and didn’t “speak” I/O very well, I had to try a different approach. Rather than speaking over their heads in my own language, or faking it using their language, I tried to pick something neither of us were experts in – microeconomics. What’s interesting is that that presentation became my modus operandi for tuning systems. As I went from customer to customer, each with a different application or architecture, I needed a normalized approach so I didn’t get lost in the technology.