Comment by batbomb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by batbomb | Hacker News Reader

Okay, this is beyond silly. Still ignoring tape.

Explain how BDXL, a new format, which has never proved itself beyond a few years, which costs $45 for a few hundred GB, which AFAIK has very little data on re-writability (which is probably terrible and close to one-time use) could be any more profitable or reliable, or useful than tape.

I don't buy it. Tape would be the logical short-term choice to get started, because Amazon could just go buy an off-the-shelf tape library and add tape as they needed from Oracle, versus again, engineering their own BDXL library on the expectation that it would cost less than tape, taking into account factors such as:

1. Reliability and degradation 2. Supply 3. Cost 4. Reusability/Re-Writability

Not tape.

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud-storage-h...

No, it doesn't definitively say the backing storage is not tape based. Only that:

    "Essentially you can see this as a replacement for tape,"

and:

    "inexpensive commodity hardware components"

Nowhere did they explicitly deny that it may be tape-backed.

In addition, From the article:

     Instead, Glacier runs on "inexpensive commodity hardware components", he said, noting that the service is designed to be hardware-agnostic.

Which may allude to the fact that the backing storage itself may be flexible (a combination of HDD, Tape, possible BDXL)

The author himself only acknowledges:

    This suggests the system will be based on very large storage arrays consisting of a multitude of high-capacity low-cost discs.

Which isn't definitive in the slightest. Also, the article is over 18 months old.

I've said it before, I wouldn't be terrible surprised if they got started with old commodity hardware to get started, but the economics and characteristics of tape still seem much more amenable to the use case.

"Replacement for tape" is tape? OK.

"Essentially you can see this (our tape) as a replacement for [your] tape".

"Asked what IT equipment Glacier uses, Amazon told ZDNet it does not run on tape."

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