I think you've about nailed it. There's one really tough issue though, which you've implicitly touched on:
"c) mechanisms exist for easy and fast off-site archival storage" (emphasis mine).
The biggest and most critical use of tape for many companies (outside of a fairly small window of a few weeks or months), is utter disaster recovery, legal compliance, and intelligence protection. That leads to tapes being kept offsite for a long time (seven years here--probably the same in the USA). Stuffing labelled tapes offsite is easy--stuffing drives offsite is more complex, as they don't have big friendly barcodes on them; nor do they suffer being dropped well.
For short term storage, near-line systems are starting to take over though and I could NOT be happier!!!
We are legally required to keep seven years of backups, at a monthly granularity level. That's 84 FULL backups of our 50TB environment kept offsite, in addition to our weekly fulls and daily incrementals, all kept for two months.
Disk can replace tape for some things, (we're considering eliminating onsite tape entirely in the next two years), but keeping multiple petabytes of storage offsite isn't feasible without tape.
The only privacy "issues," are ones that are inherent to the very concept of universal ID tags, and those are very much impatiently waited for by a subset of the end users.
Furthermore, what's bad about the patent itself? It seems fairly reasonable to me.
As a small enterprise scale medium, DAT has lived a long and healthy life, completely independent of the RIAA.
As a SOHO it's hard to say that the RIAA hamstrung it, because it's suffered exactly the same fate as every other SOHO backup format that's come along. Tape backups (hell, ANY backups) just haven't sold to anyone who can get away with not getting tossed in jail for not having them. Backups SUCK, and are a big financial loss unless something goes wrong, which of course only happens to 'them,' never 'us.'
The only thing the RIAA really did with DAT was keep it from becoming a ubiquitous audio recording format, i.e. a direct replacement for analog tape. That's bad enough, but don't tie their efforts to the computer industry, because they weren't smart enough to realise that it would have been a problem.
Let me get this straight: You have a four-node cluster, you have 1.6TB of online storage, and you need some sort of permanence; and you're not using RAID of any form?
This is utter insanity! Without RAID, your only hope of safety is in your backups--which you're only asking about now!
RAID your data ASAP, and then start looking for backup systems. Take a look at some of the DLT4000 replacements.
Replacing computer parts in a desktop (let alone this agreement, which is for laptops!) IS rocket science for UPS. Those assholes couldn't put two legos together without an act of God, and if that happened, they'd charge you an AoG surcharge.
Storyline? DOOM? Doom was about the finest example of 'pure adrenaline, no plot' that ever came along. I'd be happy if they could make a sequel that was as fun as Doom, with just as thin of a plot.
For plots, I'm either playing adventures (Syberia II most recently), or Thief III right now. Now THAT is a unique game.
Ah now see, we're getting very close to the crux of the matter.
I have no problems with governments spending money on unprofitable ideas for the common good. I have a problem with them funding for-profit private companies to develop those unprofitable ideas.
And what makes you think those 5 million verified addresses for $300 are anything but utter bullshit? You're trusting a spammer's word that those addresses were valid at some point in the last 20 years, which is neither relevant to current affairs, nor necessarily true.
There are two types of email lists with VERY different pricing schemes: the garbage ones that spammers sell to suckers (worthless, which is why they sell 'em for "only" $300), and the ones they sell to each other. This list is at the very top of the heap of the second category.
I was out of university and working when Doom was released. I remember the entire campus network crawling to a halt as every student and young-ish staff member 'in the know' tried to download the TWO ungodly large floppy images for the demo. Took me six hours to download ~2MB that day.
Or to put it in a different context, I was starting to learn how to program on a PET2000 before you were walking. That should make you feel younger.
This whole thing stinks. I'm fully in favour of private space research--but having NASA give money away makes it "publicly funded private enterprise." In other words, companies are spending tax money on personal profit.
Have one or the other, or even both, but don't give public money to private enterprise.
In terms of the spectrum being off, it depends on the bulbs you get. Some mixture of incandescent, fluorescent, and sunlight is just fine.
However, "eye damage?" Get thee to a personal injury lawyer, quickly! He's the only one who could come up with a rational reason for fluorescents damaging your eyes.
Hmm. What's the cost of buying (say) six drives vs. buying four, plus a RAID controller? Or more likely, ten drives vs. five plus a controller? RAID5 is generally more affordable than mirroring.
"Tho do remember that no amount of raiding will save you if you lose 2 drives through some horrible freak of badness"
Not true. RAID 1+0 ("Raid 10") is moderately resilient to double-failures if engineered properly. RAID5+0 is entirely protected from dual failures, but of course chews up over 50% of your disk space.
If you're into mid-range storage, Network Appliance has "Diagonal parity RAID" which basically guarantees that a system will remain up and available with no loss of data from a two-disk failure. I got a long and involved explanation of how it works from one of the NA guys, and it's absolutely simple, beautiful magic.
But none of this detracts from your comments on backups. They're quite necessary indeed!
We do that routinely, although not in a station wagon. I think they use a minivan instead.
Every week, a duplicate copy of our backup tapes goes offsite for an eight week period. Once every second month, a set is cut that's kept for seven years, as required by law.
The odds of a single tape image being bad are pretty low these days--maybe 0.2%. The odds of three copies of an arbitrary tape being bad is 0.2^3 or slightly less than 0.01% chance of failure. Multiple copies make an enormous difference, and keeping them separate is only sensible.
The coolest redundant environment I worked in was one that had a three machine cluster with a huge disk/tape HSM system attached, and daily copies cut for offsite. Pretty impressive, no? Well, this entire environment was mirrored on the other end of town, and the two setups were connected by dual fibre, carefully routed through unconnected underground tunnels. THAT was pretty damned close to 100%.
Just a note for your 100% uptime requirement. Hitachi guarantees 100% uptime on their high end disk arrays. Not 99.9%, not 99.999%, not 99.9999999%, but 100%. However, that's 100% scheduled uptime. No unscheduled outages ever. Maintenance does happen at times, though.
That said, I know of one installation where the only downtime in three years was because the entire building power was shut down for two days (more than the UPS could handle).
Seriously, MyDNS requires an SQL database. This is NOT a way of making things easier!
I've never understood what problem people have with BIND. It's as simple as it could possibly be. Everything makes clear sense. The config files are plaintext. It's backwards compatible almost to eternity. I use it because it's the best solution, not the only one.
"if they had any sense they'd be positioning themselves to provide services and software further up the software stack, above the commodity level."
Well that is, in fact, exactly what they're doing. Jonathan Schwartz is just an ass who doesn't understand his own company.
Look at their bread and butter these days: 4-20 processor systems attached to huge disk, running Solaris. In other words, they're filling in the niche between highest-end Intel gear and mainframes, and still doing it well.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've about nailed it. There's one really tough issue though, which you've implicitly touched on:
"c) mechanisms exist for easy and fast off-site archival storage" (emphasis mine).
The biggest and most critical use of tape for many companies (outside of a fairly small window of a few weeks or months), is utter disaster recovery, legal compliance, and intelligence protection. That leads to tapes being kept offsite for a long time (seven years here--probably the same in the USA). Stuffing labelled tapes offsite is easy--stuffing drives offsite is more complex, as they don't have big friendly barcodes on them; nor do they suffer being dropped well.
For short term storage, near-line systems are starting to take over though and I could NOT be happier!!!
Heh. Tell you what--when we get rid of our 40 drive DLT7000/8000 library and move to LTO2, I'll see if I can toss some your way. :-)
You're right of course--second-tier technology is excellent for small-medium offices.
That doesn't really scale very well.
We are legally required to keep seven years of backups, at a monthly granularity level. That's 84 FULL backups of our 50TB environment kept offsite, in addition to our weekly fulls and daily incrementals, all kept for two months.
Disk can replace tape for some things, (we're considering eliminating onsite tape entirely in the next two years), but keeping multiple petabytes of storage offsite isn't feasible without tape.
Sadly, no.
The only privacy "issues," are ones that are inherent to the very concept of universal ID tags, and those are very much impatiently waited for by a subset of the end users.
Furthermore, what's bad about the patent itself? It seems fairly reasonable to me.
Hmm. Backing up to 300 tapes every weekend would be fairly lumpy for me. That's not including offsite duplication.
I think I'll stick to a mattress, and let the professionals hold onto my tapes.
As a small enterprise scale medium, DAT has lived a long and healthy life, completely independent of the RIAA.
As a SOHO it's hard to say that the RIAA hamstrung it, because it's suffered exactly the same fate as every other SOHO backup format that's come along. Tape backups (hell, ANY backups) just haven't sold to anyone who can get away with not getting tossed in jail for not having them. Backups SUCK, and are a big financial loss unless something goes wrong, which of course only happens to 'them,' never 'us.'
The only thing the RIAA really did with DAT was keep it from becoming a ubiquitous audio recording format, i.e. a direct replacement for analog tape. That's bad enough, but don't tie their efforts to the computer industry, because they weren't smart enough to realise that it would have been a problem.
Let me get this straight: You have a four-node cluster, you have 1.6TB of online storage, and you need some sort of permanence; and you're not using RAID of any form?
This is utter insanity! Without RAID, your only hope of safety is in your backups--which you're only asking about now!
RAID your data ASAP, and then start looking for backup systems. Take a look at some of the DLT4000 replacements.
Fine Woodworking and Acoustic Guitar are about the only magazines I actually pick up and read. Life ain't all bits.
Replacing computer parts in a desktop (let alone this agreement, which is for laptops!) IS rocket science for UPS. Those assholes couldn't put two legos together without an act of God, and if that happened, they'd charge you an AoG surcharge.
Storyline? DOOM? Doom was about the finest example of 'pure adrenaline, no plot' that ever came along. I'd be happy if they could make a sequel that was as fun as Doom, with just as thin of a plot.
For plots, I'm either playing adventures (Syberia II most recently), or Thief III right now. Now THAT is a unique game.
Ah now see, we're getting very close to the crux of the matter.
I have no problems with governments spending money on unprofitable ideas for the common good. I have a problem with them funding for-profit private companies to develop those unprofitable ideas.
And what makes you think those 5 million verified addresses for $300 are anything but utter bullshit? You're trusting a spammer's word that those addresses were valid at some point in the last 20 years, which is neither relevant to current affairs, nor necessarily true.
There are two types of email lists with VERY different pricing schemes: the garbage ones that spammers sell to suckers (worthless, which is why they sell 'em for "only" $300), and the ones they sell to each other. This list is at the very top of the heap of the second category.
I was out of university and working when Doom was released. I remember the entire campus network crawling to a halt as every student and young-ish staff member 'in the know' tried to download the TWO ungodly large floppy images for the demo. Took me six hours to download ~2MB that day.
Or to put it in a different context, I was starting to learn how to program on a PET2000 before you were walking. That should make you feel younger.
Never played it, but it sounds sort of like System Shock, which was way better than Doom. :-)
OK, DOOM was brilliant as a 2D/pseudo-3D adrenaline rush. SS was brilliant as a 2.5D/3D plot-driven FPS.
FUCK that idea!!!
This whole thing stinks. I'm fully in favour of private space research--but having NASA give money away makes it "publicly funded private enterprise." In other words, companies are spending tax money on personal profit.
Have one or the other, or even both, but don't give public money to private enterprise.
I wanted an answer to a simple question, that I figured should be a FAQ. However, the FAQ link from the main page goes to the FAQs for...Mozilla 1.5!
Does anyone EVER update this documentation? It's been Mozilla's biggest (and aside from the naming problems, only) problem.
In terms of the spectrum being off, it depends on the bulbs you get. Some mixture of incandescent, fluorescent, and sunlight is just fine.
However, "eye damage?" Get thee to a personal injury lawyer, quickly! He's the only one who could come up with a rational reason for fluorescents damaging your eyes.
Hmm. What's the cost of buying (say) six drives vs. buying four, plus a RAID controller? Or more likely, ten drives vs. five plus a controller? RAID5 is generally more affordable than mirroring.
"Tho do remember that no amount of raiding will save you if you lose 2 drives through some horrible freak of badness"
Not true. RAID 1+0 ("Raid 10") is moderately resilient to double-failures if engineered properly. RAID5+0 is entirely protected from dual failures, but of course chews up over 50% of your disk space.
If you're into mid-range storage, Network Appliance has "Diagonal parity RAID" which basically guarantees that a system will remain up and available with no loss of data from a two-disk failure. I got a long and involved explanation of how it works from one of the NA guys, and it's absolutely simple, beautiful magic.
But none of this detracts from your comments on backups. They're quite necessary indeed!
What, the SAME air force base? What kind of redundancy is that??!!
:-)
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
My god, why don't they worry about movies that people actually want to see!
The Day After Tomorrow? I'd rather watch static.
We do that routinely, although not in a station wagon. I think they use a minivan instead.
Every week, a duplicate copy of our backup tapes goes offsite for an eight week period. Once every second month, a set is cut that's kept for seven years, as required by law.
The odds of a single tape image being bad are pretty low these days--maybe 0.2%. The odds of three copies of an arbitrary tape being bad is 0.2^3 or slightly less than 0.01% chance of failure. Multiple copies make an enormous difference, and keeping them separate is only sensible.
The coolest redundant environment I worked in was one that had a three machine cluster with a huge disk/tape HSM system attached, and daily copies cut for offsite. Pretty impressive, no? Well, this entire environment was mirrored on the other end of town, and the two setups were connected by dual fibre, carefully routed through unconnected underground tunnels. THAT was pretty damned close to 100%.
Just a note for your 100% uptime requirement. Hitachi guarantees 100% uptime on their high end disk arrays. Not 99.9%, not 99.999%, not 99.9999999%, but 100%. However, that's 100% scheduled uptime. No unscheduled outages ever. Maintenance does happen at times, though.
That said, I know of one installation where the only downtime in three years was because the entire building power was shut down for two days (more than the UPS could handle).
Seriously, MyDNS requires an SQL database. This is NOT a way of making things easier!
I've never understood what problem people have with BIND. It's as simple as it could possibly be. Everything makes clear sense. The config files are plaintext. It's backwards compatible almost to eternity. I use it because it's the best solution, not the only one.
"if they had any sense they'd be positioning themselves to provide services and software further up the software stack, above the commodity level."
Well that is, in fact, exactly what they're doing. Jonathan Schwartz is just an ass who doesn't understand his own company.
Look at their bread and butter these days: 4-20 processor systems attached to huge disk, running Solaris. In other words, they're filling in the niche between highest-end Intel gear and mainframes, and still doing it well.