Talk at Fall 2012 CNI

I gave a talk at CNI's Fall 2012 Membership Meeting entitled The Truth Is Out There: Preservation and the Cloud. It was an updated and shortened version of a seminar I had given in mid-November at UC Berkeley's School of Information. Below the fold is an edited text with links to the resources.

Sharing makes Glacier economics even better

A more detailed analysis of the economics of Glacier sharing the same infrastructure as S3 than I posted here makes the picture look even better from Amazon's point of view. The point I missed is that the infrastructure is shared. Follow me below the fold for the details.

Nostalgia

Google has a nice post with a short video commemorating today's 50th birthday of the Ferranti Atlas, the UK's first "supercomputer". Although it wasn't the first computer I programmed, Cambridge University's Atlas 2 prototype, called Titan, was the machine I really learned programming on, starting in 1968. It was in production from 1966 to 1973 with a time-sharing operating system using Teletype KSR33 terminals, a device-independent file system and many other ground-breaking features. I got access to it late at night as an undergraduate member of the Archimedeans, the University Mathematical Society. I wrote programs in machine code (as I recall there was no mnemonic assembler, you had to remember the numeric op-codes), in Atlas Autocode, and in BCPL. Best of all, it was attached to a PDP-7 with a DEC 340 display, which a friend and I programmed to play games.

Updating "More on Glacier Pricing"

In September I posted More on Glacier Pricing including a comparison with our baseline local storage model. Last week I posted Updating "Cloud vs. Local Storage Costs which among other things updated and corrected the baseline local storage model. Thus I needed to updated the comparison with Glacier too. Below the fold is this updated comparison, together with a back-of-the-envelope calculation to support the claim I've been making that although Glacier may look like tape, it could just be using S3's disk storage infrastructure.