RE: [AV Media Matters] Let's just get rid of tape and optical mediaentirely

[lists@richardhess.com]

Jim,

I completely agree with the revised post--let the rules of data center
management address the preservation issues.

BUT, don't be so hasty to think that spinning hard disks are the only
solution. There are power/heat/maintenance issues that still may make a
tape/removable disc system attractive. I think we may get away from tape,
but migrate towards optical discs managed as part of the IT environment.

Of course, archive size is a huge contributor to this.

Cheers,

Richard

At 07:36 AM 04/07/2001 -0600, you wrote:

>Charles Repka wrote:
>> Jim
>>
>>I'm surprised.  You of all people.  To advocate a specific mechanism
>>and method archiving data.  You, sitting on a virtual museum of old,
>>obsolete media formats.  Yes, the cost of hard drives will continue
>>to come down and become competitive with other storage media.  But a
>>hard  drive is just another media.  It is just a bunch of spinning
>>magnetic discs.  We are rapidly approaching the packing limits  that
>>can be achieved with magnetic media.  And it will most likely be
>>replace by some form of quantum mechanism ( I'm serious)  And what
>>makes you think that you will still have the proper computer
>>interface to retrieve the data stored on your stack of hard drives,
>>20, 30 or 50 years from now?  Assuming they're still functional that
>>is
>>
>>Charles Repka
>
>To clarify - my thoughts and perhaps it best to provide a bit more
>detail. No I never thought to keep them on the SAME disks - clearly this
>is not a scenario that is reasonable - rather the thought is that the
>assets are far better managed in an IT environment - that means that the
>data will be migrated to new disks as the system gets upgraded over
>time. I did not get into what good IT practice is - but of course it
>includes back ups - storage in multiple locations, disaster and recovery
>plans. There is a great deal of information on the Web if people are
>interested - and of course this is actually a profession and taught in
>colleges and there is an accrediation process and so forth. I see the
>data as compressed using LossLESS compression - perhaps the JPEG-LS
>algorithm which is an interframe compression technique designed for
>excellent compression with high quality continuous tone images - it
>appears to be an ISO standard - it has open source code. Images
>compressed in this fashion could be stored in a RAID topology with the
>ability to regenerate on line with either disk mirroring or through
>regeneration if striped - and of course as mentioned multiple backups in
>different locations. I see this as an adjunct to the medialess archive
>that I have been a proponent of and which now seems to have some steam
>behind it as peer to peer network topology.
>
>Clearly the idea is to make it easier and cheaper to migrate the
>information - this is one of the key issues now.
>
>James Lindner

Richard L. Hess                           email: rlh@marielynnhammond.com
Vignettes Media                           web:   http://marielynnhammond.com
Glendale, California, USA