Bilbo! 'sup?

Just got power back here (ice storm, my woods went going off like rifle shots last night, my 125 pound dog skidded off front porch, and just got coffee at noon here).

Client to my south is MIA: the entire chunk of the state 10 miles south of me still goes without power. Could be a ton worse, I know.

It’s Tuesday, and I may have the truck chipped open by Thursday.

Regarding Virtual Tape I'm trying to find some kind of angle on it that hasn't been taken in before. Going back to some stuff I wrote earlier, I don't know that anyone would go into a tape environment if they didn't have existing backup software that expected to work with tape. Legacy apps hold back some of the transition.

The industry seems to consolidate towards Disk To Disk To Tape now; I'm trying to get to some true Disk Wallah friends to get better interpretation of that particular issue *but* seems that at least with that middle tier of disk I may be able to do more of the dedupe optimization because I don't have to muck with the serial access of the tape media.

I don't want to proclaim tape is dead, but it surely seems, from reading the "talking heads" usual suspects out there in the analyst community that it has really transformed: what matters is the virtual, not the tape. Still smelling intrinsic lock in, (so what, like, get a manager application to manage the manager manager application?) and there are many extant rants about the "who runs this" and unhappy back doors into the system to enable features like "if 2+2=5 then 2+2=5" kinds of kludges.

"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" as Tolkien wrote.

I'm all over the caveats for the emptors, and suggest a vigorous scrubbing of any proposal to ensure that total costs and operational implications are walked through in detail. Something has to be "running" the infrastructure with assurance of the integrity of the data. De Dupe could be the planner who really doesn't game it out. I, truly, glaze over and turn to the serious people with scars and pocket protectors. My sense though is that tape fades: spinning moves to solid state, and even solid state becomes ephemeral with nano and finer grained media. The Virtual Tape business has saved millions of dollars (dozens of Loonies at today's rate) and solves a serious problem by abstracting the media, to a great extent, from the implementation. But a full model of "the business" can work wonders.

Think “The Sims” for Storage.

So maybe I should just post this? Another tree broke, dog is needy.