Whilst NetApp and EMC scrap over meaningless willy waving; the rest of the world try to get on with real work and real world problems. Yet again, sat in a meeting where the requirement is for a grow-forever and delete nothing archive but with the requirement for ‘instant retrieval’ and with a really simple user interface so that a non-technical user can cope. In fact they would really like the archive just to appear as a drive letter on their desktop and be able to just drag files back.
There is part of me who fancies doing a mad science experience using a bizarre mix of an Avere NAS accelerator and NFS-exporting an entire tape library using LTFS. I do wonder if it’d work…build a tape-based Dropbox like solution. Perhaps Avere fancy building a proof of concept system and taking that to NAB or something, I think it might get some attention.
Of course we’ll probably do something sensible and more conventional but a tape-cloud…that’d be kind of fun!!
Hey, I know how you hate it when vendors suggest pre-fabricated answers (and thus deprive you of the joys of self-assembly), but I’ve been using Atmos with the new GeoDrive (local drive letter) — and it’s pretty easy. It can handle *really* big objects, and is deemed safe and secure by the powers that be. If you don’t want to buy Atmos, there are plenty of global service providers who can offer it as-a-service.
Just sayin’
Enjoy your mad scientist project. Maybe we can give you the Atmos-in-a-VM edition and you can experiment that way?
— Chuck
— Chuck
Chuck, disk simply is not economic…it doesn’t work for us. We’ve looked and we’ve really thought about how we could use Cloud, it doesn’t work for us today.
The Atmos quotes I’ve seen are an order of magnitude too high. I know you guys in EMC find this hard to believe but really it’s true.
[Disclaimer: Yet another vendor blog commentary]
Martin, I am sure you are pitched by vendors on a daily basis, so I keep this just short:
* we can solve this problem using software for your grow-forever-and-delete-nothing archive (we can add versioning to this equation btw)
* clients can access it using desktop software using a “drive letter” as you mentioned
* we will sell you SW while you buy commodity HW. the storage economics work then.
* We can help you get to Amazon S3 $ / GB levels
* everything stays on-promise though
[stopping here]
I’d love to help you to get a prototype installation. Please feel invited to contact me directly.
But but but tape is dead havn’t you heard? /sarcasm
Yes I regularly get a memo on how tape is dead….I actually, I would agree that tape may well be in decline for the world of backup but for long term, grow-forever archives…it is extremely hard to do this with disk in an economic way; especially when you throw in power and other environmentals.
We already have two areas of the business who are on grow-forever archives and I’m expecting yet more. At some point, disk will become viable but it still struggles. We keep an eye on the situation all the time mind you.