crane@harvard.ARPA (Greg Crane) (10/05/84)
What is the actual current state of laser disks out there? Does anybody have any first hand experience with them? Who is offering them? How big and how expensive? How slow are the access and transfer rates? Any predictions about when they will be ready? My specific applications call for massive amounts of on-line storage, and occasional spikes of CPU intensive work (mostly looking up things in inverted indices, but occasional linear searches of one to several hundred mbytes of text). The ideal configuration would be a network of 68020's, each with a laser disk, each running some form of UNIX, and accessible to a large variety of small machines (MAC's or IBM PC's). There is a significant market, I think, for a system of this type. Also, if you have a large read-only disk, with a decent transer rate but murderously slow access time, you don't need a fancy file system that is set up to allow you to change files efficiently. You could just start off by running the 4.2 file system with a large block size (40 or 64K), but does anybody know whether it would be worthwhile to avoid the file system altogether and just write something simpler? Anybody out there working on a system that fits this general description? Anybody out there with a 68000 UNIX box ready to slap on a Shugart laser disk or whatever as soon as such a disk becomes readily available? If everybody else is too busy getting rich with CAD/CAM applications, anybody out there willing to support development of such a system if nobody is working on it? Gregory Crane Widener Library Harvard University
perry@heurikon.UUCP (Perry Kivolowitch) (10/07/84)
I suggest the June Usenix Conference proceedings or an upcoming issue of
UNIX World. The paper called: Optical Storage Management Under the Unix
Operating System. By (me) Perry S. Kivolowitz
--
Perry S. Kivolowitz, Heurikon Corp, Madison, WI
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G. Marxzemon@felix.UUCP (Art Zemon) (10/09/84)
harvard!crane crane@harvard.ARPA (Greg Crane) writes: > What is the actual current state of laser disks out there? Does anybody > have any first hand experience with them? Who is offering them? How > big and how expensive? How slow are the access and transfer rates? > Any predictions about when they will be ready? We (FileNet Corporation) build a laser disk storage device called an OSAR(tm) library -- Optical disk Storage and Retrieval library. This is a jukebox type machine holding up to 64 optical disks and up to four optical disk drives. Single sided disks hold one gigabyte; double sided hold two gigabytes. The capacity of the OSAR library is 128 Gb. Access time to a mounted disk is four seconds. Access time to an unmounted disk is twelve seconds. Transfer rates are comparable to that of large hard disk drives. Prices start at $85,000 for quantity one. You can send us your check now. Our sales staff can give you a delivery date. > My specific applications call for massive amounts of on-line storage, and > occasional spikes of CPU intensive work (mostly looking up > things in inverted indices, but occasional linear searches of > one to several hundred mbytes of text). We also build a complete FileNet(tm) Document-Image Processor which uses up to eight OSAR libraries for back-end storage. The system consists of a number of 68010s running Unix and communicating over an Ethernet. Rather than ASCII terminals, access is via an Integrated Workstation consisting of a 68010 (running Unix, of course) and a 20" bit-mapped display, windows, mouse, etc. The Document-Image Processor stores images of paper documents in addition to ASCII textual matter. I hope this whets your curiosity. Rather than clutter up net.unix-wizards with more of this, however, write either to me via electronic mail or to our marketing department via US Mail: FileNet Corporation Marketing Department 1575 Corporate Drive Costa Mesa, CA 92626 (714)966-2344 I wish I had seen your request a week ago. We just got done displaying the system at Info 84 in New York and you could have seen it there. ---------- OSAR and FileNet are trademarks of FileNet Corporation. -- -- Art Zemon FileNet Corp. ...! {decvax, ihnp4, ucbvax} !trwrb!felix!zemon