Right now in Orlando there is the 2011 IBM System Storage Technical University. Every year at this event they release market trends and various numbers, and every year tape is still the cheapest solution (per TB).
However these figures do not take into factors such as labor or flexibility.
The title choosen by the author of the original post: "Best Offline Storage Method For Large Archives?" Your answer: "Why not go with an online storage solution such as Amazon S3"
I suspect that one of you is off-topic, but I also wanted to say that S3 is really a great service and quite cheap.
> Screw tape... you pay $2,000 USD for the drive, $50+ per tape for a couple of hundred gigs
What brand of hardware are your buying? Rolex? A LTO-5 cartridge is about 60$ and unless you format it with a very, very big cluster size it will store 1.5TB, not 200GB.
> I buy bare drive hard cases for about $3 each
Ok, I see. For tapes you shop at Rolex but for your "neat setup" you browse eBay until you find one of those Hong-Kong power sellers that ship on the Pacific Princess Express Line. Makes sense.
I agree with that, unless the budget is insanely low hard disks are a no-brainer. They are also easier to encrypt than tapes and offer a much higher rate of reuse.
If price is not an issue, a great solution is to go with a data-deduplication device (such as EMC DataDomain or IBM Protectier). If you were to host one unit in your basement and the other in coloc environment far from your home, you could setup replication and have a very reliable archive. Coloc of a 1U device can be quite cheap, I have one of them for which I pay less than 100$ a month.
If you have a smaller budget, then the best cost-benefit is still found on tape, and it can even work in case of network disruption. Like Andrew Tannenbaum said: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes". A single LTO-5 tape is very cheap (50-60$) and can store 1.5TB (can easily double that with dedup).
There are other interesting technologies out there, such as MAID, which you can use as a VTL with a good backup software to maintain a reliable archive, however cheap disks are cheap and in a MAID configuration they might not last as long as typical disks because of the on/off behavior.
I bet this mysterious bug is actually caused by a build script trying to pry source code from the bottomless pit of horror that is Git. One could qualify that as an "incredibly subtle pathname lookup bug"...
For everything besides committing, Git is horrible. This thing is actually making SourceSafe looks trusty and convenient.
Now that the world is running on Linux (except for MySpace and GoDaddy) it is a crime to impede its evolution by using such a painful system. Down with Git, and long live Anything Else.
> Where do the anti tax hikes people think the money goes?
The question is not: where the tax money goes. The question is: where does it come from. Answer that and you will get the real reason why the gap between the poor and the rich is increasing.
Poor people don't pay tax. Rich people can afford the little tax they pay once their accountant has been on their case, or they can afford to move their business in a fiscal paradise. Who's left? The people who used to be in the middle class, the one paying for the $46 trillions that the government will spend over the next 10 years (including the $8.7 additional trillions that the current administration is proposing).
It's a complete shame that someone wants to increase tax when even the GAO can't give an estimate of how much money is wasted in the current budget.
> Nice twisting of reality here to make a story, reporters. Touchscreen devices of all varieties have been doing this for years. Even PalmOS was inverting the onscreen keys as you pressed them
You are the one twisting reality. Good stuff on the iPad = invented by Apple. Bad stuff on the iPad = same problem with all the other products in the universe but the other products are actually worse because they had it before and nobody fixed it.
This being said, it is a good thing you posted this as AC, otherwise people could have stolen your Slashdot password just by watching you typing it on your iPad.
Sound argument. Just like: "you have an easy PIN on your debit card, why are you surprised someone stole your money" or "you were wearing a short skirt at the office, why expect your boss will not harass you".
It is important to refuse unacceptable behavior even if no sufficient safeguards are in place, so the people and organizations learn what they can and can't do. It's like seeing someone slapping his/her kid in a restaurant - if you complain they may snap back at you and tell you to mind your own business, but the impact of a stranger telling them that what they do is wrong is very likely to prevent them from doing it again. This is part of the social contract.
What they did in this case was wrong, and it's a good thing to make a fuss about it and not let people think that privacy is only something that takes place in a doctor's office.
So what's next? An ISP will publish the search history of its subscribers as a research project. but will "protect" privacy by replacing usernames with numbers? Or something crazy like that? That would be insane.
> some people say that it's better to allow a hundred guilty people go free than imprison one innocent person. I'm not sure if I agree with that
If one day you are the one innocent stuck with 100 guilty people maybe you will change your mind. If you want a second opinion on this, ask the mother of Freddy Krueger.
> The PC world has been transformed, and Apple's market cap exceeds Microsoft's.
Of course market capitalization is an indicator of success and sound business value based on product quality and nothing else. Ask anyone who invested in Enron, Nortel or Bre-X.
Huge projects usually fail because they are deadline-oriented. From there everything goes down the drain because every bump on the road will cause the project managers to either :
1) compromise on the quality of the implementation, which leads to resistance from the people in charge of maintenance because they feel that problems are offloaded to their department. This actually initiates a downward spiral in quality and collaboration areas.
2) compromise on the number of features that are delivered, which leads to resistance from the project owner and will usually cause significant side effects as the impact of missing components is underevaluated.
Both alternatives lead to more bumps in the road, and the cycle starts again.
A deadline-oriented project also places consultants in a perfect position to do whatever they want, which is usually either repeating a solution that worked in another organization (without really knowing if this is a good fit in the new one) or taking the opportunity to learn something new that they can put on their resume. Whenever someone complains they have this magic wand called "deadline" which they can use to make all the restrictions (such as design patterns or IT best practices) go away.
When the deadline becomes a goal instead of a guideline, and when an organization is ready to let consultants call the shots instead of placing them in a controlled sandbox where they can bring value without creating chaos, then the project is doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now in Orlando there is the 2011 IBM System Storage Technical University. Every year at this event they release market trends and various numbers, and every year tape is still the cheapest solution (per TB).
However these figures do not take into factors such as labor or flexibility.
backup != archive
a lot of people don't make the distinction.
The title choosen by the author of the original post: "Best Offline Storage Method For Large Archives?"
Your answer: "Why not go with an online storage solution such as Amazon S3"
I suspect that one of you is off-topic, but I also wanted to say that S3 is really a great service and quite cheap.
> Screw tape... you pay $2,000 USD for the drive, $50+ per tape for a couple of hundred gigs
What brand of hardware are your buying? Rolex? A LTO-5 cartridge is about 60$ and unless you format it with a very, very big cluster size it will store 1.5TB, not 200GB.
> I buy bare drive hard cases for about $3 each
Ok, I see. For tapes you shop at Rolex but for your "neat setup" you browse eBay until you find one of those Hong-Kong power sellers that ship on the Pacific Princess Express Line. Makes sense.
I'll wait until they have it on Blu-Ray or at least Tivo
> stay away from hardware RAID! When your controller dies, so does all your data, unless you have an identical spare controller card
I totally agree. On some systems even a broken RAID-1 cannot be recovered using a different controller.
It's a good thing that more and more filesystems are going beyond RAID (such as zfs or btrfs) and even storage unit are moving to block replication.
I agree with that, unless the budget is insanely low hard disks are a no-brainer. They are also easier to encrypt than tapes and offer a much higher rate of reuse.
> and a _good_ storage controller such as a xyratex.
I would rather run Windows Home Server on a RAID-0 of IBM DeathStars installed in a HP Pavilion than deal with a Xyratex.
If price is not an issue, a great solution is to go with a data-deduplication device (such as EMC DataDomain or IBM Protectier). If you were to host one unit in your basement and the other in coloc environment far from your home, you could setup replication and have a very reliable archive. Coloc of a 1U device can be quite cheap, I have one of them for which I pay less than 100$ a month.
If you have a smaller budget, then the best cost-benefit is still found on tape, and it can even work in case of network disruption. Like Andrew Tannenbaum said: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes". A single LTO-5 tape is very cheap (50-60$) and can store 1.5TB (can easily double that with dedup).
There are other interesting technologies out there, such as MAID, which you can use as a VTL with a good backup software to maintain a reliable archive, however cheap disks are cheap and in a MAID configuration they might not last as long as typical disks because of the on/off behavior.
It would be awesome to see a "top kill" using nucular waste.
(Yeah, nucular)
I bet this mysterious bug is actually caused by a build script trying to pry source code from the bottomless pit of horror that is Git. One could qualify that as an "incredibly subtle pathname lookup bug"...
For everything besides committing, Git is horrible. This thing is actually making SourceSafe looks trusty and convenient.
Now that the world is running on Linux (except for MySpace and GoDaddy) it is a crime to impede its evolution by using such a painful system. Down with Git, and long live Anything Else.
> Where do the anti tax hikes people think the money goes?
The question is not: where the tax money goes. The question is: where does it come from. Answer that and you will get the real reason why the gap between the poor and the rich is increasing.
Poor people don't pay tax. Rich people can afford the little tax they pay once their accountant has been on their case, or they can afford to move their business in a fiscal paradise. Who's left? The people who used to be in the middle class, the one paying for the $46 trillions that the government will spend over the next 10 years (including the $8.7 additional trillions that the current administration is proposing).
It's a complete shame that someone wants to increase tax when even the GAO can't give an estimate of how much money is wasted in the current budget.
> Writing programs with only 640K memory or a whopping 1024K if you could make tap the extended memory really separated the men from the boys.
Humm, reminds me of something...
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-09-08/
Maybe you mean one "iOS" ?
Oh my mistake. Same thing, different monopolistic company.
> Nice twisting of reality here to make a story, reporters. Touchscreen devices of all varieties have been doing this for years. Even PalmOS was inverting the onscreen keys as you pressed them
You are the one twisting reality. Good stuff on the iPad = invented by Apple. Bad stuff on the iPad = same problem with all the other products in the universe but the other products are actually worse because they had it before and nobody fixed it.
This being said, it is a good thing you posted this as AC, otherwise people could have stolen your Slashdot password just by watching you typing it on your iPad.
Well I guess you missed the point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal
Sound argument. Just like: "you have an easy PIN on your debit card, why are you surprised someone stole your money" or "you were wearing a short skirt at the office, why expect your boss will not harass you".
It is important to refuse unacceptable behavior even if no sufficient safeguards are in place, so the people and organizations learn what they can and can't do. It's like seeing someone slapping his/her kid in a restaurant - if you complain they may snap back at you and tell you to mind your own business, but the impact of a stranger telling them that what they do is wrong is very likely to prevent them from doing it again. This is part of the social contract.
What they did in this case was wrong, and it's a good thing to make a fuss about it and not let people think that privacy is only something that takes place in a doctor's office.
So what's next? An ISP will publish the search history of its subscribers as a research project. but will "protect" privacy by replacing usernames with numbers? Or something crazy like that? That would be insane.
> Yahoo Answers isn't a content farm. It's a legit place where users post general questions and other users answer
I love Yahoo Answer, especially when people take the time to reply "I don't know".
> some people say that it's better to allow a hundred guilty people go free than imprison one innocent person. I'm not sure if I agree with that
If one day you are the one innocent stuck with 100 guilty people maybe you will change your mind. If you want a second opinion on this, ask the mother of Freddy Krueger.
> So it is your position that Apple doesn't have any talented engineers and is all about marketing
Everything is black or white, isn't it? As you say: interesting, yet typical
Marketing made the iPod, not geeks.
> The PC world has been transformed, and Apple's market cap exceeds Microsoft's.
Of course market capitalization is an indicator of success and sound business value based on product quality and nothing else. Ask anyone who invested in Enron, Nortel or Bre-X.
Huge projects usually fail because they are deadline-oriented. From there everything goes down the drain because every bump on the road will cause the project managers to either :
1) compromise on the quality of the implementation, which leads to resistance from the people in charge of maintenance because they feel that problems are offloaded to their department. This actually initiates a downward spiral in quality and collaboration areas.
2) compromise on the number of features that are delivered, which leads to resistance from the project owner and will usually cause significant side effects as the impact of missing components is underevaluated.
Both alternatives lead to more bumps in the road, and the cycle starts again.
A deadline-oriented project also places consultants in a perfect position to do whatever they want, which is usually either repeating a solution that worked in another organization (without really knowing if this is a good fit in the new one) or taking the opportunity to learn something new that they can put on their resume. Whenever someone complains they have this magic wand called "deadline" which they can use to make all the restrictions (such as design patterns or IT best practices) go away.
When the deadline becomes a goal instead of a guideline, and when an organization is ready to let consultants call the shots instead of placing them in a controlled sandbox where they can bring value without creating chaos, then the project is doomed.
> Just look up slashdot.org at Google/Trends. This isn't what Slashdot used to be
Go Canada!