lezo@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Lez Oxley) (02/15/91)
Data Compression Devices are now available for 8mm, 4mm and .5 inch SCSI Tape Drives to enhance data transfer rates and to increase tape capacity up to 4 times. Typically, it is claimed that an Exabyte cartridge could now hold up to 6.6 gigabytes of data. Digidata market a model 4000 (tm) data compressor and Peripheral Vision Corporation market a 4Sight (tm) Data Compression module. There are other products on the market as well. Has anyone out there in netland got any experience of these kinds of devices? How do their claims bear up in practice? How reliable are these devices? Has an industry 'compression' standard emerged yet? If so what devices should one go for? Or is it best to wait awhile until this (new?) technology is proven? We have a Sequent S27 and Sequent Exabyte and are interested increasing our backup capability. Are Sequent doing any work in this area that they can tell us about? What kind of device will they be supporting in future to cope with the backing up of large databases? -- Lez Oxley, Administration, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RH, UK Tel: +44 273 606755 x3808 Fax: +44 273 678335 JANET: lezo@uk.ac.sussex.syma ARPA: lezo%syma.sussex.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk BITNET: lezo@syma.sussex.ac.uk UUCP: lezo@syma.uucp
pavlov@canisius.UUCP (Greg Pavlov) (02/25/91)
In article <4501@syma.sussex.ac.uk>, lezo@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Lez Oxley) writes: > > Data Compression Devices are now available for 8mm, 4mm and .5 inch SCSI > Tape Drives to enhance data transfer rates and to increase tape capacity > up to 4 times. Typically, it is claimed that an Exabyte cartridge could > now hold up to 6.6 gigabytes of data. > Boy, this is very tempting. But I am scared by the thought that, 5 years from now, I'll be asked to restore some crucial data from an old cartridge tape, my compression gizmo will have died and I couldn't get it fixed/rep- laced, and the cartridge will thus be useless. pavlov@stewart.fstrf.org