As I am writing this, I am crossing the Atlantic for the seventh time in about two months. I’m on my way to CloudExpo West in Santa Clara, one of the few technology trade shows that are still growing. At the event I will be sitting on the last Object Storage for Big Data panel of the season. Robin Harris – aka StorageMojo – and I have been working hard this fall educating the industry on the benefits, challenges and opportunities of Object Storage. We’ve been trying to explain how the current generation of Object Storage platforms is so much different from the first attempt at it (EMC’s Centera), how it enables companies cope with the massive amounts of unstructured data that we are all generating and how companies can even monetize archived data by re-activating their archives.