John Hearns wrote:
In 2009, twenty years later, I think he might have a different take on this.
I put all my bits onto floppys when I left there, and moved the important
ones to spinning rust. I can still read the floppies. I doubt he can still
read the tapes.
This is I think referred to as 'digital archaeology'
:) (visions of scientists holding up some rust as they dig through a
plastic tape, and saying "look, I found a bit!!!")
The point is that tape folks talk about longevity. But this makes a number
of important assumptions about the media, the drives, and availability of
replacement drives, which, as my advisor in graduate school discovered after
her drive died, are not necessarily correct or accurate.
There. You have the concept - now, to add value to my SATA eating
expanding storage array, you need to engineer it
so your company can come along and bolt onto it the next type of
storage - cakes of Blu-ray disks, multi packs of thumb drives, or
whatever. The smart storage array will already be migrating your data
before you even know it is out of date.
The hard part comes in disguising the bills to the Chief Finance Officer.
Actually, what you described is *exactly* cloud storage. And the CFO
would love (generally) to pay for it. Add whatever capacity you need,
and pay for it ... only when you need it. Lowers the cost per TB or per
GB ... however you want to view it. Your cost to run 1TB includes
power, cooling, space, etc. Your cost to increment this costs whatever
quantum of storage you currently pay in whatever size you pay for it.
What if, rather than in large "kerchunk" amounts (with gleeful sales
critters rubbing hands together), it was in effectively whatever size
amount you needed?
Without turning this into a commercial, we are working with a few folks
in this regime. Anyone interested in this stuff, bug me offline.
Do remember, TANSTAAFL though ... you have to pay the storage loaded
cost, the bandwidth costs and latency to get data.
I have a feeling, if the governments really invest in infrastructure
that this might be much less of an issue going forward ...
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics,
email: land...@scalableinformatics.com
web : http://scalableinformatics.com
http://scalableinformatics.com/jackrabbit
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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