QUERY: Re: Sony Petasite

Eugene Leitl (eugene@liposome.genebee.msu.su)
Sat, 27 Jun 1998 19:11:14 +0400 (MSD)


Bryan Moss writes:

> I'd did a search at sony.com and came up with
> this...
>
> http://bpgprod.sel.sony.com/matrix.bpg
>
> But, Eugene, what the hell do you need 2 petabytes
> for?

Hi Bryan, big thanks for the url. I have to do some unofficial
consulting for a big (and rapidly growing!) archive here, to see
whether it is cost-effective to archive 1.5 Mfiles a la 150 page
each as 300 dpi facsimile (roughly 0.1 MBytes/page, so currently
it totals at about 23 TBytes). Since the number of queries is
<100/day, and the archive is a FIFO (oldest entries currently
are from 1927) magnetic storage, whether RAID or a tape library
seems not appropriate, CDR/DVD/WORM jukebox is probably the
solution. Still, I have to mention the other alternatives in
the report to explain why a jukebox is best.

To all IT pros out there: any idea which storage medium has the best
price/performance ratio at modest durability (let's say, a decade)?
Since scanning is the bottleneck, progressively better storage devices
should become available during the conversion, which asks for a moving
target strategy.

It would be also extremely useful to learn the ballpark price for the
jukebox units. I do not expect them to be cheap, though the technology
but for cartridge robotics is offshelf. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

ciao,
'gene

> BM