[Beowulf] dedupe filesystem

[John Hearns]

2009/6/5 Joe Landman <landman at scalableinformatics.com>:
> > A brief anecdote.  In 1989, a fellow graduate student was leaving for
> another school.  He was taking his data with him.  He spooled up a Vax 8650
> unit with a tape.  I asked him why this over other media.  His response was,
> you can read a Vax tape anywhere.
>
> 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'


> 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before you even know it is out of date.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.