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I have told people in my circles for years that relying on "cloud" backups is an invitation for disaster for a few reasons: 1. It's not your server, even with legal agreements (how enforcible they are can vary from country to country), someone could hit the "rm" script and bye-bye data. Suing (even if it is an option) can't get the data back. 2. If you lose your connectivity to the Internet or the site, or the service provider is out of business, your data is effectively gone temporarily or permanently). 3. Any staff member can view that data. encryption (which can be intentionally weak or have a back door) can be used against you without you even knowing it...(until it's too late to do anything) We are a culture taught to "set and forget" and this artist, like most of us, got caught up on the idea that is data would be kept safe, which is exactly the mindset on that groups like Google, Iron Mountain, DropBox, Microsoft, Apple and many other "cloud providers" intentionally provide.The only way to be sure your data is secure (assuming you don't care who views it as much as making sure it's preserved) is to have your OWN local backup in addition to a cloud drive. You can create your own cloud drives to reduce the number of people likely to have access to the data (remember encryption is NOT a guarantee of security). There are many programs (free and commercial) that can help with your backups. Areca (open source/free/user friendly), Acronis (commercial, user friendly) and other products like Bacula (less user friendly), Bareos (Bacula fork). there are others, list here: http://www.enterprisestoragefo... Most people will be happy with Areca: http://www.areca-backup.org/in... We all have to remember we have to protect our own data and not get "headlight" frozen by everybody repeating "cloud storage" in our ears to the point it overrides our common sense. We have so many tools available to the public to protect ourselves and our data now. All we need to do is turn on our common sense/brains. I feel for this artist, but he should at least be a reminder to all of us of the truth we all know but somehow keep ignoring. Oh, at $150 CAD for 2 TB, we don't really have price as an excuse. Oh, also remember hard drives often die between 3-5 years (enterprise, Western Digital Black, Hitachi Ultrastar) or 1-3 years (Western Digital Black, i.e, green blue, red, purple, Hitachi Deskstar series). I don't mention Seagate because I've had too many bad experiences with them. I assume 1-2 years for their drives based on experience and test of Meantimes between failure, but Seagate drives are the cheapest, so for datacenters they are popular with their RAID 6 and RAID 10 setups.

more disks, and they send a copy to euroarchive and the Library of Alexandria. in 2006, that copy & verify process to remote site took two weeks.

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/features/article.php/3633256/The-Wayback-Machine-From-Petabytes-to-PetaBoxes.htm

"very few people understand how Gartner works and what makes them tick. In UP and to the RIGHT: Strategy and Tactics of Analyst Influence: A complete guide to analyst influence"

Company hires Analyst to write report on their particular sector. Analyst writes positive report on Company. Analyst writes negative report on Companys competitors.

"Friday October 23rd will see Gartner argue a motion to dismiss a complaint by ZL Technologies Inc about the famed Gartner Magic Quadrant.

According to court papers, Gartner will argue to dismiss based on First Amendment rights citing that the Magic Quadrant is not meant to represent statements of fact but is based on pure opinion".

See also: MS-Gartner in tangle over Linux-knocking reports, and 'paying the analyst tax'

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/print/storage-hardware/linux-file-system-fsck-testing----the-results-are-in.html

going through 3 pages is so annoying...

This is what you get when you drag a magnetic head across a surface. The sooner we get rid of mechanical storage the better. Solids are more robust, more energy efficient, quicker, denser, lighter. Cost and longevity issues are coming along. Yes, lets ditch the antiques already!

Problem is, SSD aren't useful in an enterprise situation since they degrade over time with usage and this isn't the issue with disk based HDs. If they can fix this then your more likely to see big businesses want them, but till then thats means possible loss of data and the need to upgrade hardware sooner.

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/ipstorage/news/article.php/3879726

There we go. Somebody is talking about the article.

I'm not a storage expert, but something about this article seems half-baked. For example, looking at the rebuild table, from 2002 to 2005, rebuild time stayed roughly the same, while drive size went from 146gb to 300gb and bandwidth went from 89 to 119 MB/sec. Is there a problem with that?

Then, from 2005 to 2009, rebuild time dropped, even though disk size went from 300gb to 450gb, because the number of drives on the channel doubled from three to six. Again, is there a problem?

Now looking at his second table, I guess the author's point is that since rebuild times have increased from 5.28 hours in 1994, to 6.6 hours in 2009, and drives have gotten 100x more reliable (10e14 vs 10e16), the ponderously slow, 2-order of magnitude growth in drive reliability won't keep up with the dramatic 25% increase in rebuild times.

Is this the point he's trying to make?

They seem to have better than average data integrity and protection, FWIW. http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/ipstorage/news/article.php/3813921

I wonder if this development has to do with this:

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/news/article.php/3809601

Which would mean, like processors & RAM, that it's designed to be replaced or upgraded as the need arises.

The company I work for sells far too many AIT, DDS and DLT drives than is healthy for the customers, but they just don't see the importance upgrading, as you say.

However, disk is expensive. Even iSCSI. Contrary to popular belief, tape is not dead. Tape is also a tenth to a fifth of the cost of disk. Adding more drive arrays is far less cost effective than tape.

Co-lo failover systems have their place, but trying to run a backup over the internet is going to be painful. A single LTO3 drive writes at about 70MB/sec, that's 560 Megabits/sec. Effectively, an OC-12. Those aren't cheap. I regularly deal with tape libraries that can hold 20 to 24 LTO3 drives. That's a lot of bandwidth. Granted, your SAN better have the balls to keep up, or you've got bigger problems.

An L700 equipped with 20 LTO3's can backup half a petabyte (500TB) in about seven and a half hours. And, no matter what Hollywood may think, four hard drives in a briefcase, just won't cut it. ;-)

... it seems that the first (per movie) is about reasonable, the second is for justifying high prices, quote:" "Right now the best available cost estimate, when we look at our total cost of ownership for storing on disk, which is accessible all the time, is about $1,500 per terabyte per year," says Moore. The cost for archival tape is considerably less, about $500 per terabyte per year, with retrieval time (or latency) in minutes."

CC.

San Diego Super Computing Center (SDSC) has 2 Petabytes of online Storage with 400TB for researchers. They have 18PB of archival tape storage.

Still....I like datacenters. The hum of equipment. 65 degree temps and lower. I once had my cube re-located to a tape library. Quiet...peaceful place

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/hardware/fea tures/print.php/3634881

You're right in general. My reference is to the Financial Data Protection Act of 2005 passed by the House Financial Services Committee two weeks ago. As this article on HR3997 says:

"The legislation also pre-exempts any state laws mandating breach disclosures to consumers. According the Consumers Union, 11 states currently have stricter notification standards than H.R. 3997, including a California law that has resulted in numerous consumer notifications over lost data tapes and database breaches."

If DATA isn't melded with HR3997, then Californians won't lose the current access to credit freezes. I of course expect the business-friendly version to just fizzle away, now that the consumer-friendly version exists.

It works. Reliably. In my previous job, we pretty much depended on it. A single faulty tape could cost us from $50k and up. And we didn't do backups of data on it... The tape drives were used continuosly 24/7.

If you can afford it, is an entirely different question. I think it's about $30k...

This is Microsoft's scrapped Hailstorm initiative all over again. Except that it's Google doing it. It's interesting to note that two of Haistorm's key architects (Mark Lucovsky & Adam Bosworth) now work at Google.
I suppose they think the same idea would work if a different company did this.

All the big players are buying into this. For the Google-challenged:

EMC's take from todays Cnet
CA
HP
IBM(tho' they prefer the acronym HSM or Hierarchical Storage Management)
Veritas
Random googled pundit on the entire field.

What interface are they using? Even the fastest SCSI can't provide 3GB/s!

FC-AL, aka Fibre Channel:

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/n ews/print.php/3295601