Monty Dickerson -

Reponse to the User Storage Increase Challenge

Funny Ad

But first, a word... http://www.backuptrauma.com/video/(approve sites)

February 5 comments

Assertion: The lowest TCO, $/MB, for on-demand storage is Hard Disk Drive; the lowest TCO for backup is also the Hard Disk Drive! Postulated: The live/local backup of the datastore should be HDD, and the remote mirror of the datastore should be HDD, and the offsite backup of the datastore should also be HDD.

• Tape backup is too expensive when you consider all of the hardware and manhour costs involved and is less reliable and not much more compact/transportable than HDD.
• DVD-R optical disc is more reliable than tape, but more expensive than HDD. (It has an archive advantage of being readonly (after burn), however.) And DVD carosels are as expensive as tape jukebox robotics! But for small datastore, or less-frequent (incremental or full) backup, on some regular interval may be ok?
• Network Attached Storage appliances? should be commodity for NFS, Samba or web DAV access protocols, greatly reducing admin burden and overhead cost.
• ?? Storage Area Network? device clusters should become commoditized as standards coalesce (using et gratia 1000BaseT bus and iSCSI protocol) ??

Febrary 7th

""Media Matters, a technical consultancy specializing in archival audio and video material, recently completed a Mellon Foundation funded Digital Video Reformatting Preservation Project for the Dance Heritage Coalition. They conclude that MXF is the recommended container format, JPEG-2000 is the recommended encoding format and HDD is the recommended storage media." http://www.danceheritage.org/preservation/Digital_Video_Preservation_Report.doc(approve sites)