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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hal Campbell who wrote (3839)	11/17/1998 10:54:00 AM
From: Richard Esmond	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17679

I don't think you are. In the conversations with StorageTech I asked many times if erasures were possible on segments of the tape if exact offsets (absolute or relative) were known, and they said that you could not. Reasons: 1) When writting the tape drive wil verify the overwrite data to be accurate, if any variances were detected, the overwrite data would be written again. This would cause the overwrite segement to be longer than desired. Thus overwritting data beyond the file to be erased and into the next. 2) They said the drives erase head was located ahead of the write head. So overwritting 10 blocks would erase 11, one too many. 3) The tape drive once it completed a overwrite pass would place a EOF marker at the end. And that again would be bad. I am not sure I beleive all of this. If it is true, I am not very impressed. If Ampex does better that will be a huge advantage in the Gov space. 5015 RMA is a comming mandate, and its comming fast. I do intend to put a proposal in front of Ampex. But being an SI junky I was hoping to get a leg up on what attitudes and issues I might encounter. The main technology that I intend to pitch is a NT based near-line storage managment platform. The products three main current features are; folder oriented clustering of data on the media to facilitate prefetching of groups of files, NT based distributed cache servers for remote users and HTTP interface to offer high performance integration into web applications. The one new feature we are adding now is a 'stream oriented' API to make integration with video servers easier. We would offer a storage subsystem to video server vendors, like a near-line driver, but more fully elaborated. These vendors might like to oem a completed system for storage issues, and focus internal development on things more directly video data oriented. Any thoughts or opinions are apreciated. You can post them here or e-mail me at RESMOND@DHS.COM, thanks.