cross platform archiving

[Herb Sevush]

[Andrew Richards] “when you consider that it is a server with a few TB of HDD and a $3K LTO drive in it, you can see how they arrive at their prices.”

I’m not questioning their pricing, they get rave reviews it seems from everyone who uses them. The problem is dealing with enterprise instead of consumer oriented gear, economies of scale do not bring the costs down. We are all spoiled by being able to hitch our wagons to mass produced commodities, and I believe it’s actually to be harder to do that in these new Ipad days for those of us who still need heavy iron.

[Andrew Richards] “GNU tar or LTFS on LTO-5 are starting to be used for deliverables in some places.”

If this trend continues then someone will come up with a less expensive way to do it. This reminds me of the old linear days of editing when a floppy drive for a dedicated controller could cost $2000, when that very same physical drive, less the specialized drivers, cost about $80. Someone had to be paid to write those drivers, and if your only selling a few hundred units the cost doesn’t get spread out very far.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Andrew Richards]

[Herb Sevush] “We are all spoiled by being able to hitch our wagons to mass produced commodities, and I believe it’s actually to be harder to do that in these new Ipad days for those of us who still need heavy iron. “

I totally agree. Given the apparent decline of the PC as we know it, heavy duty NLE work in five years may all take place on server hardware, and who knows what the OS landscape will look like by then. It seems like Windows is charging toward a unification of tablet and desktop UIs even faster than OS X is.

Best,
Andy

[Jeremy Garchow]

Can’t recommend Cache-A enough.

It solves this hassle for you. We work on osx, but our SAN is NTFS and the cache-a can read and write from everywhere.

Yes, it’s more expensive. If you want to save a few grand, go with the lto4 prime cache if your needs are simple.

[Herb Sevush]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Can’t recommend Cache-A enough.”

If I had the 8K I would. But for less than half I just bought an LTO5 from Maxx Digital with the BRU Server Small Office software that runs on OSX and Linux. I’m good to go on my Mac Pro for now, and if I switch platforms I can continue my archives by booting under Linux.

Thank you everyone for your help.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Jeremy Garchow]

There you go. Have fun with it!

I spent the better part of two months archiving everything we had on sata drives to tape, and a backup tape.

Took a while, but didn’t lose a single byte.

[Herb Sevush]

Got my LTO 5 yesterday, backed up my first 1.2 Tera and I’m just waiting for more tapes to arrive so I can back-up my whole raid. Ended up getting the Tolis BRU server software and while I won’t say it’s a snap to use, with a little hand holding from Tolis tech support it’s been great.

Just wanted to thank everyone for their invaluable assistance.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Les Fitzpatrick]

There are actually two costs for LTO-5 solutions regardless of whether you employ Bru, Cache-A, SDNA, etc. Besides the up-front pricing, you face annual software agreements which are quite pricey. I suspect as the archival industry matures, these extraneous costs for upkeep will diminish. I wish I could hold my breath for a cloud solution, something I’ll readily pay for when we reach efficacy. While there are cloud solutions available, the industry leaders/enterprise solution providers ask about $2,000 a month for 10 terabytes. For my small shop, I consider this to be more than 2000 times the cost I can afford to pay. Today, the archival industry is in the baby-step phase yet millions of users are prepared to spend good money for a safe tapeless environment.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Les Fitzpatrick] “There are actually two costs for LTO-5 solutions regardless of whether you employ Bru, Cache-A, SDNA, etc. “

Hmm.

I was unaware that there’s extra software you need for Cache-A.

Also, there’s no way cloud is remotely practical for us at this stage in the game.

Even if costs were down, the bandwidth would be horrific.

I estimate we have 60ish Terabytes in our archive. How long would that take to upload to the cloud? 🙂

Jeremy

[Les Fitzpatrick]

Jeremy,

You are so right. The cloud is truly vapor-only at this time as it pertains to throughput and cost per terabyte. As to “extra software,” I’m speaking not to software but software support–the annual tithe all the archival solution providers want in perpetuum. It’s got to get simple!

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Les Fitzpatrick] “As to “extra software,” I’m speaking not to software but software support–the annual tithe all the archival solution providers want in perpetuum. It’s got to get simple!”

We have an LTO4 Cache-A and don’t need to pay for support, at least haven’t needed to yet.

Has something changed?

Jeremy