[Leica] Digital academia

[spencer at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)]

Hi John,

Very nice. The techie in me says "Cool. Can I borrow it?" :)

I am not sure I want to know how much those LT04 tapes are. :))

My home built NAS cost about $1K including 5.5Tb of disk space. Good enough 
for my purpose. Nowhere near as cool as yours though.

Regards,
Spencer

On Mar 22, 2010, at 20:22, John Nebel wrote:

> 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.