With the amount of digital data in data centers growing annually and storage budgets highly constrained open source storage system designs can fill an important niche for data centers and IT people comfortable with installing and maintaining their own hardware.
As severed fins could be easily stored, it made economic sense for fishing vessels to remove the fins at sea, rather than bringing the entire animal - which would quickly fill a vessel's cold storage areas - into port.
If you don't have a spare machine lying around to serve duty as a file server, you can either get a cheapo bare bones PC to fill the role, or invest in an external storage solution.
It's a staggering collection rate, but storage technologies have advanced so far that it would still take him years to fill up a typical desktop computer's hard drive.