As you may have noticed, I made some major changes at Backup Central today.  We upgraded to Joomla 1.5, changed the add-on we used for comments, and upgraded MediaWiki to its latest version as well.  In addition, we now have a template that gives you the same look and feel no matter where you are on the site. This should make things much easier to use.  Here are just a few of the new features:

• Due to popular demand, we now support comments without logging in
• RSS Feeds for comments
• It’s now much easier to edit the Wiki articles.  Just log in to Backup Central and choose any article in the Wiki.  Voila!  There’s the Edit button!
• We’ll also have an all new front page and logo, but neither of those are ready just yet.

Just in case you’re curious, the logo that IS on the front page is just a placeholder put there by the guys that designed the template.  I have no idea what the big N is for. 😉

If you have any trouble using the new site, please let me know by clicking Contact Curtis.  Thanks!

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Chris Mellor wrote an article a few months ago that basically predicted the death of tape by 2014.  The basis of the article and the prediction was an executive summary of a market analysis report from the Santa Clara Consulting Group, (SCCG), “the leading source of market information relating to the removable data storage industry for more than 25 years,” even though I’ve never heard of them until this article.  (Am I alone here?)  The report mentioned that tape revenues were down 25% in 2009, and Chris extrapolated that if this were to continue, the tape business would cease to exist by 2014.  I was going to write a blog post about that back then, but forgot.  Pierre Dorian wrote an article about the future of backup tape that also sourced this study so I was reminded that I wanted to take a look at the numbers in this report and see if I can make sense of them.

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When I first heard of LTFS (the Linear Tape File System) I have to admit my first reaction can best be summed up by this sound bite from Zoolander.  With VTLs, we had disk pretending to be tape; now we have tape pretending to be disk!?!!   I was reminded of other filesystem-on-removable-media attempts that I’ve seen that I also haven’t been that excited about, and the linear nature of tape does not really lend itself to typical filesystem access. Are these guys crazy?  Yep. Crazy like a fox.
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CDP kind of came and went like SSPs.  Some said it stood for “Customers Didn’t Purchase.”  Others saw it as the Star Trek of the backup world – a great idea before its time.
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