Sony Helping Create New Mass-Storage Optical Disc Archive Solutions

[Kreij]

Archiving Terabytes of information in the "cloud" costs you a monthly fee. Sitting on high-density optical disk(s) does not.

All in all, it really depends upon your needs, your budget and how automated you want the access to archival data.

[Easy Rhino]

Originally Posted by Kreij

Archiving Terabytes of information in the "cloud" costs you a monthly fee. Sitting on high-density optical disk(s) does not.

All in all, it really depends upon your needs, your budget and how automated you want the access to archival data.

sure as with all things IT related.

[Scrizz]

I definitely do not want to use the cloud as a backup or even archival purposes...
I've already lost so much stuff.



I blame digibuc >_>

[Kreij]

Many companies who sell you "space in the cloud" are renting space from large server farms owned by someone else who has cloud services. So if the wind blows the cloud away, you can't do diddly and neither can the company your paying.

I'll stay in the dirt.

[L'Eliminateur]

As a sysadmin as well and system integrator, i rather have my data archived on ultra-high-density LTO tapes AND they have +15 years archival life.

Plus it's an OPEN standard with a clearly defined and real roadmap (and DLT even failed hard against it), whilst sony is always doomed to fail thanks to their propiecrap technology (MOs?, DAT?, VXA?) with ridiculous pricing(even for enterprise standards).

Companies want hard copies of the data in their vaults and offsite highly secured vaults, all that "cloud cloud" is pure nonsense, it's like "virtual money".

[burtram]

This to me, seems like the new "high tech" version of the old tape drives.

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

Originally Posted by Easy Rhino

this seems crazy expensive and full of fail. optical discs are not as dependable and far more expensive than a raid array. very lame.

Exactly! The days of optical media are long gone.

[Steevo]

Originally Posted by Kreij

Okay here's my take on it as a sys admin.

Archival storage is for data that is not being accessed with any regularity or perhaps not at all unless there is some need to get historical references to something. Many times access to archival data is based upon a request for access (at which time the archive can be pulled and put online) and not on an immediate need.
Some IT departments will keep a portion of their archives online(or at least readily available) based upon the likelyhood of access need, and simply pull obsolete or unused data by request only.

Anyway, for small and medium sized businesses (and even some large businesses), not running HDD arrays can reduce overhead and replacement costs by utilizing other archival mediums (tapes, ODs), when high data availability and high access performance is not imperative.

As far as Sony using a propretary format that only works with there stuff, that's almost a given. But proprietary does not equal fail if there is a genuine market need (or desire) for this type of format.

As always, time and the markets will determine this projects success or failure.

We use Tape still on our AS/400, its a PITA. Nightly backups. However we run RAID 5 in it, and on our other server. The other server gets backed up to disk that is kept in the safe. More or less prone to damage than tape in the event of emergency? Both are screwed, but a 15 minute system incremental update over firewire VS a 1 hour or longer backup to tape? Tapes cost alot, wear out, and the Tandberg drive had to be replaced two years ago at the low price of almost a grand.


Tape = crap.

HDD storage is cheap and reliable.

Originally Posted by L'Eliminateur

As a sysadmin as well and system integrator, i rather have my data archived on ultra-high-density LTO tapes AND they have +15 years archival life.

Plus it's an OPEN standard with a clearly defined and real roadmap (and DLT even failed hard against it), whilst sony is always doomed to fail thanks to their propiecrap technology (MOs?, DAT?, VXA?) with ridiculous pricing(even for enterprise standards).

Companies want hard copies of the data in their vaults and offsite highly secured vaults, all that "cloud cloud" is pure nonsense, it's like "virtual money".

Cloud is reliable as long as you are hosting it with a reputable company. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple (really, but no), and many others.

Tape is still the primary way, but it is going to die sooner or later.

[L'Eliminateur]

Steeve, only a grand?, and since you say Tandberg i'm assuming it's DLT?

LTO-5 drives cost upwards of 2~3K, and they're well worth it.

If you have a decent backup software that implements D2D2T with good rotation, then the old tapes are vaulted offsite (one tape per month maybe) and you retain the closest backups in the intermediate cheap sata disk array.

i don't see tape dying not even in mid term, it's going to continue to be the bechmark for backups.
The change is going to be for SOHO, that in the past had no options but shitty DAT drives (they have USB DAT nowadays, but noone sane buys those, slow as hell, unreliable as any other Sony product), now with 2008R2 support those small businesses uses inexpensive external USB drives for backup.
(Interesting fact that 2008R2 dropped tape support for "ntbackup" -not that anyone used it on 2008 anyways-)

[Syborfical]

Is this just more proprietary Sony crap?