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Technology Stocks : Aahh...iNEXTV (AXC) The NEXT Thing! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HPilot who wrote (1973)	8/29/2000 1:47:53 PM
From: HPilot	Respond to of 4169

My favorite post from the usenet thread. >I'm working in a radio and television broadcasting company. We intend (we >need...) to digitalize everything we do for the moment (24/7 radio - 14/7 >television). We do have 10,000 hours of video archives to digitalize, >100,000 audio references to digitalize too, let's say nearly 340 TB for >archive and between 11 and 20 TB more each year. We need to backup also...> >Different suppliers (storagetek-compaq) have made me hesitate... Sto is >saying "let's do tape storage with libraries, access time less than a >minute, automatic maintenance, ... don't worry.." >Compaq says "Let's put it on disk drives (libraries with X x 72 Gb disks, >it's faster and means more interoperability, reliability, accessibility,..." Compaq is acting without regard to your industry. First, Compaq has conveniently forgotten that the purchase price of X x 72GB disks (plus the racks, etc. to hold them) is only part of the story: who's going to pay for the power and cooling to keep all those spindles spinning? Secondly, how do Compaq propose that you back up X x 72GB disks? [ Note: without any kind of RAID protection, X equals 4722! ] Thirdly, you have growth requirements. In 5 years, every single one of those X disks will have reached their maximum design age, and can reasonably be expected to start failing. Care to imagine what a replacement drive will cost then? And if you assume that the current "maximum capacity" disk is then 288GB (instead of 72GB), what does that do to (a) your overall system architecture (which will be a mix of 72, 144, and 288GB disks) and (b) the rest of the drives in your RAID group. Fourthly, Compaq appears to be using a novel definition of the words "interoperability, reliability and accessibility". Do you really believe that you'll be able to grab one of their disks and walk into another studio and have them read the contents? Do you recognize that the MTBF numbers quoted for disk drives apply during their expected lifespan, NOT beyond that point (i.e. they can all die simultaneously in 5 years, without contradicting the MTBF figure)? And can you remove a particular disk containing a particular file (i.e. show, broadcast, etc.) and store it in a safe somewhere? Fifthly, and most damming: Compaq has apparently no clue what the access pattern of a broadcast station against its storage looks like. You are not a "traditional" data processing shop, you cue the material to be played to air in advance. So the fact that an all-disk solution allows you essentially instantaneous access to any bit is unimportant: you ain't going to want to do that! And once you find the material, it runs totally sequentially into the decoders and into the distribution system (cable, anntenna, satellites, whatever). >My question : what's more reliable in your opinion ? Disk or tapes ? We do >need to broadcast efficiently 24/7, we need to deliver signal to 2 or 3 >different programs at a time, and we need high data throughput (we do >brodcast for example for TV in MPEG2 10 Mb/s - up to 10 channels at a time). Your environment is 100% tailor made for tape. The fact that Compaq is trying to convince you otherwise is, to me, indicative of a need for you to find another vendor... if they don't understand this, what else don't they understand? My guess is that you're not located in the USA, so possibly haven't made it to the NAB show recently? However, the executive summary is that tape seems to be good enough for PBS, ABC, Fox, HBO, etc.... (and one company appears to be the leader in that field, and it's neither of the two you mentioned. But someone else did...)