Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: flickerful who wrote (6541)	3/26/1999 9:23:00 AM
From: Carl R.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

Thanks for that article. A bit of historical information in it explains why the DST is such a hard sell: The inter-agency project involved migration of the data from the terabit mass storage system(TBM) developed by Ampex Corp., an industry leader in the 1970s. Ampex entered the large scale high performance systems market in the early 1970s with a high speed tape system designed to hold 1 terabit of data and rapidly locate and transfer the data to supercomputing systems. Five systems were sold to the community, principally in the atmospheric modeling arena. The largest system was installed at NCAR, at a cost of between $1 million and $2 million, over a period of several years; another system was installed at NOAA for archival of TIROS N and future NOAA weather satellite data. Ampex did not have a market for the product and eventually dropped support. The agencies that had purchased this equipment were left with their only copy of satellite data on this media with no operational backup. So, Ampex had a leading edge product, and after selling a five of them to the government, dropped support. In the end 11% of the data was lost permanently because there were no surviving tape drives capable of reading the data despite great effort by the government to keep drives running long enough to get all the data transferred. Not exactly an enviable history. I can see the ad campaign "Trust Ampex - Your data is safe with us, so long as it is convenient for us". Carl

To: flickerful who wrote (6541)	3/26/1999 1:46:00 PM
From: Hal Campbell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

Superb link, Shamus. Thank you! Both sobering ( History ) and promising. The DST IS the solution...the sole solution ...to their problems.IF trust can be restored. For instance...just one small instance from a skim ... << For a cost of nearly $250,000 the NCCS upgraded the remaining five StorageTek silos to faster robotics (2.5x), in preparation for mounting more than 33,000 800 MB tapes for repacking onto the more dense 10 GB tapes. Requiring more tape mounts to support an average monthly rate of 1.5 TB of new data into the system, the NCCS installed IBM Magstar tape drives in its StorageTek silos in August, 1997, Increasing the amount of data a silo can store twelve-fold. >> If those tapes were transferred to quad density AXC tapes ...not only would the work be done MUCH faster ...but instead of having 2,640 tapes to store and keep track of..they would have 40. In addition, AXC's format allows precise partitioning...insertion and erasure. Which further reduces wasted space and time ( the other formats do not).Again, DST IS the solution to all of the problems mentioned in that excellent link.. And it is here right now. If you can simply get them to believe AXC will be around ( it is as Mike said, a whole new management team).