Shyh-Wei ,
We looked at several units over a year ago, but as you indicate, they had
very slow access rates. We have special needs to be able to move these
volumes at very high speeds so most of them did not meet our initial reqs.
I'm sorry, but I don't remember any of the vendors right now except for
CDC. The CDC unit was to costly so we didn't look at it much either.
We are meeting with someone early next week who is using D1 technology from
Sony, I think, and this looks good, I'll be glad to send you their name
after I have more information. They are the ones that offer the $.20/MB
device.
The option we have really been looking at was opticle based rather than
tape based for the past year. Pinnicle indicated that they were going to
offer a 4GB optical platter in a Juke with ~70Gbs of space for ~$10K to
$15K. But, they never were able to get us a unit due to problems on the
production line. I haven't checked back with them in about 3 months so
this unit may be out by now. Unfortunately, with the new 10GB 3.5" disks
and the new 27GB 5.25" disks (?) that should soon be out, the cost of
optical may still be a bit high???
Also, we are now interested in this new D1 tape unit, because we have the
ability to have a 200GB partition with the Sony unit. this is important,
because we are now moving to Raid & expect to have 35GB partitions in the
cell, and we expect to have volumes as big as 4GBs to 8GBs. This would
eliminate the optical 4GB partitions.
Sorry, I can't be more help, but I'm sure someone out there has seen some
of the DLT or Exabyte based units? Mic
----------
> From: Shyh-Wei Luan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Mickey Beddingfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: last volume access time / volume space management
> Date: Thursday, October 31, 1996 4:28 PM
>
> On Oct 31, 4:43am, Mickey Beddingfield wrote:
>
> > Sorry, but there seems to be a disconnect here? I have been talking
about
> > moving volumes to a nearline storage device that looks like a disk or
> > disks. Some of these devices use optical media and some use tape &
staging
> > disks. If you use a device like this then this partition or partitions
can
> > be mounted under AFS & thus you have a bigger cell so all the info is
still
> > in the VLDB, etc. We are looking at a device like this now and expect
our
> > cost/MB to be ~$.20/MB vs real disk at ~$.45/MB vs RAID at ~$.75/MB
>
> I think the confusion was due to my misunderstanding of your way of using
the
> nearline storage. Using them as disks certainly sounds interesting. Can
you
> recommend some of such devices with tapes that you mentioned? If this
approach
> with reliable/fast tapes can materialize, the cost/MB should be much less
then
> $.20/MB? I guess you are concerned with the access rate with tapes. But
would
> it be a good trade-off for the volumes that are not accessed at all?
>
> > > If a volume stay migrated for a long time, the backup done before the
> > migration
> > > might get expired and overwritten. This is especially true if you
are
> > using
> > > the AFS backup system (backup, butc, buserver) and tape recycling,
right?
> >
> > We build backup lists every night to determine what volumes need to be
> > backed up full or incremental. We can specify what servers/partitions
will
> > be backed up, thus we can elect not to backup this nearline storage
devices
> > partition or partitions. Also, we keep our weekly full backups for
three
> > years so unless our users need something for more than 3 years we are
> > covered.
>
> The need for a backup of the migrated volumes is unlikely with such a
long
> retention period of your weekly full backup. I agree.
>
> Shyh-Wei
>
>
>
