[Beowulf] Big storage

[Leif Nixon]

"Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> writes:

> On Thu, 30 Aug 2007, Jakob Oestergaard wrote:
>
>> I find it interesting (and surprising) how little people like tape :)
>
> It isn't that difficult to understand.  People WOULD like tape and USED
> to like tape back when a single tape on a single tape drive would back
> up your whole system.  I even remember those days.  But what, maybe
> seven or eight years ago the hard disk curve (which has an even shorter
> capacity doubling time than Moore's Law does for the rest of the system)
> crossed over the tape curve (which has a MUCH longer one) and life has
> sucked ever since.  Tape backups even back when they still "worked",
> kind of, had gotten madly expensive compared to the disk they were
> backing up -- you could pay $1000 for disk and $3000 for the tape backup
> unit really easily.

But now you're talking backups. That's not quite the same thing as
having an HSM system where the bulk of the data is stored on tape and
(supposedly) transparently migrated from and to front-end disk caches.

-- 
Leif Nixon                       -            Systems expert
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National Supercomputer Centre    -      Linkoping University
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