Comments on: Tape as the future of storage: are Sun and Dell insulting our intelligence? http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/10/03/tape-as-the-future-of-storage-are-sun-and-dell-insulting-our-intelligence/ Daniel Lemire's blog is about life in academia, research in Computer Science, wondering how we can reconcile fast databases and algorithms with the informal and asemantic nature of the world around us. It is broadcasted from Montreal (Canada). Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:56:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: Mike Stiber http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/10/03/tape-as-the-future-of-storage-are-sun-and-dell-insulting-our-intelligence/#comment-49493 Mike Stiber Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:23:48 +0000 http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/10/03/tape-as-the-future-of-storage-are-sun-and-dell-insulting-our-intelligence/#comment-49493 I think Sun is grasping at straws. As soon as <a href="http://expert-opinion.blogspot.com/2007/09/sun-going-way-of-silicon-graphics.html" rel="nofollow">they became a Windows OEM</a>, they were toast. They'll never be able to compete on price with cheap PC makers, and so they're desperately trying to come up with a way to differentiate their products. It's like a company trying to figure out a way to get people to pay $60,000 for a car indistinguishable from a Ford Taurus. Note that this doesn't preclude the ability of a car manufacturer from making a $60,000 car; nor does it mean that the only way to compete is via price. As far as tape is concerned, I'd say you're partly right. But, what if I want 500TB of storage and can accept a fair amount of access time delay? A tape library with only one or two actual tape drives will be cheaper than a bunch of disk drives. The incremental cost of adding another <em>tape</em> is much smaller than adding another HD. I think Sun is grasping at straws. As soon as they became a Windows OEM, they were toast. They’ll never be able to compete on price with cheap PC makers, and so they’re desperately trying to come up with a way to differentiate their products. It’s like a company trying to figure out a way to get people to pay $60,000 for a car indistinguishable from a Ford Taurus. Note that this doesn’t preclude the ability of a car manufacturer from making a $60,000 car; nor does it mean that the only way to compete is via price.

As far as tape is concerned, I’d say you’re partly right. But, what if I want 500TB of storage and can accept a fair amount of access time delay? A tape library with only one or two actual tape drives will be cheaper than a bunch of disk drives. The incremental cost of adding another tape is much smaller than adding another HD.

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