Every day that passed, a report landed on Miles's desk: "Operational Delay Due to Storage Contention." His name was on it.

The solution, Miles knew, was HPE SmartCache. It was a clever piece of software that turned a small, blazing-fast NVMe drive into a smart mirror for the slow, spinning hard drives that held the core data. Frequently accessed "hot" data would live on the SSD; cold data would stay on the rust. The application would see near-memory speeds, while the company saved a fortune on all-flash arrays.

His heart did a little skip. He opened the PDF. There it was: a 25-character alphanumeric string.

setcache -license add 5H9F-2KQ4-1M8P-7R3T-6W2Z

Priya winced. "Can't you just... reconfigure the cache? Move the hot tables manually?"

Then the trial expired.