On Thu, May 31, 2012 13:30, Tony Whitmore wrote:
[snip]
> The following spring to mind:
> Power consumption (& therefore running cost)
An "anecdotal" tick for HP (in the absence of power consumption data)
> Physical space
Good on that!
> Availability of spares/replacements
This is actually a biggie, the more generic you go the more you can
(arguably of course) be assured that you will be able to find bits and
bobs for your kit. Big vendors typically stop hardware support at some
arbitrary point in the future.
> Expected lifespan of existing equipment
> All worth taking into consideration I think!
Yes, absolutely. I think that it should be on the "future expense list" of
anybody hoarding data (if you value your data of course) to think of a
continuous maintenance upgrade process. Rather upgrade and migrate your
data to newer kit every two or three years, than to have to find that you
have lost your data. It's a pain, but well worth it. IMHO it should be
justifiable in order to project spending approximately £1000 or so every
two or three years to keep your data "fresh and safe". This of course
assumes that you maintain your own data, and not farm it off to things
like Dropbox and (shudder) Jungledisk.
I wish that there was a good immutable way to store large volumes of data
indefinitely. CD-RW/DVD/BlueRay and Co just seems so prone to failure (I
yet have to find an old CD I wrote 10 or more years ago that is still
readable). Where is that gold platter when you need it! :-) But in the
absence of that, best we keep on migrating our data to new/better places.
--
Regards,
Jan Henkins
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