Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/03/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Hi Spencer, Your post motivated me to photo part of the internals of a backup device, a robotic tape library with a petabyte capacity (600+ 1.6 terabyte tapes). http://www.ancientmoney.org/library.html If one has the space, time, and and a bit of knowledge, things like this can be acquired fairly inexpensively. I had installed a couple of LTO4 tape drives, and someone in Quantum service became upset and canceled a $20K/year maintenance contract - one is not allowed to work on their own equipment under their rules. Generally speaking, it is a reasonable position, however, not in every case. Quantum left me stranded with a broken hoist cable for the robotics platform, and I'd made the mistake of power-cycling the library and nothing would come online. The tape drive enclosures have electronic switches which only allow the drives to power up after the robotic diagnostics succeed. $10 for stainless steel aircraft cable (not for use in aircraft, of course) and $50 for cutting and swaging tools and it was back in operation. Quantum gave a credit for the prepaid maintenance which bought a pallet of tapes. Ultimately Quantum was apologetic and showed good integrity. I found a used library for $5.5K which works perfectly and provides the necessary backup for the backup device. In the process I looked into the library's controller and found its OS quite comforting, Linux. The OCP is a tiny flat screen xterm with a four button keyboard and the library runs Apache for its web interface. I think the interface between the robotics and the processor is serial with simple ascii commands. The interface between the tape drives and the outside is fibre channel through bridge cards. One talks to the Linux processor over ethernet, however, there is also a fibre channel card in the controller so that robotic commands may be sent via scsi over fc by the hosts. John Spencer Cheng wrote: > Don't even get me started on privacy and security of data stored in a > cloud. :) > > [Note: all these problems have some solution(s) but it's just much harder > than what the average Joe would envision]. > > Regards, > Spencer > > On Mar 18, 2010, at 15:20, Tim Gray wrote: > >> On Mar 18, 2010 at 11:30 AM -0400, Spencer Cheng wrote: >>> You are assuming that a) the company that runs the 'cloud' is still >>> around in 10-N years and b) you still have S/W that can interpret all >>> that (non-textual) data. Keeping the data accessible is only 1/2 of the >>> battle. >> Also assumes *they* do their backup correctly. In the early 2000's, >> before the 'cloud' was around, I had a website on a professional host. >> Their server took a dump. That's ok, they had backups I thought. Nope, >> two or three (I forget) of their backups were also corrupted. While they >> did have copy that was about 1 month out of date, I just used the copy of >> the site I stored locally, so all was not lost. >> >> What was the name of the online photographer's service that shut down >> last year with like 1 day of notice? >> > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information