Re: diglib: Meeting minutes

[Carol Hixson <chixson@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>]

Good clarification and I would certainly agree. I think it's important to
document these points.

Carol

On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, JQ Johnson wrote:

> My understanding mirrors Carol's on most of the points, except perhaps the 
> centralization issue.  I'd word the centralization consensus being that 
> THIS particular proposal assumes centralization, and that when additional 
> distributed storage options are needed they will probably involve different 
> sets of tradeoffs and different solutions that we are not addressing at 
> this time.
> 
> Centralization, by the way, means both physical placement and, more 
> important, consistency in design and management.  At an extreme it could 
> mean a hardware cookiecutter as we add units , but at least it means that 
> we'll add units that all run pretty much the same version of Linux and all 
> are managed the same way, backed up the same way on a consistent schedule, 
> protected by the same type of UPS, have similar hardware architectures, 
> etc.  To the extent that Travis can flesh out the details of this planned 
> consistency it will assist long-term expansion planning.  Another aspect of 
> the consistency is that the Linux will be pretty much the same as (or a 
> subset of) that run on our many other Linux servers.
> 
> I'd also add a consensus agreement as to the importance of offline and 
> offsite (tape) backup as the primary long-term archival storage, with the 
> rotating storage being the working archival copy if you will.  Given the (I 
> think correct) tradeoffs Travis has made between cost and robustness, I 
> think it's pretty likely that we'll lose (some/much of) the data on disk at 
> least once during the life of the system, and will need to depend on tape. 
> So we have to have that right. 
>