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Comment ZFS (Score 2) 475

"Is there a software solution, like a file system or a file format, specifically tailored to avoid this kind of bit rot?"

Yes, ZFS is specifically tailored for this. Configure a zpool running RAID-Z2 with a hot spare or RAID-Z3. Half a dozen 6TB or 8TB disks should suffice.

Set it to auto-scrub regularly. Send logs and warnings to your email, and pay attention to them. (This is the hard part). Especially pay attention if they stop arriving. (This is even harder).

I have used Nexenta for some time, but the free product has a limit of 18TB of raw storage. If I was starting today I would use FreeNAS which has no such restriction.

The other comments about the futility of trying to do this long term are worth heeding, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. They key is to make this an active project rather than a passive archive, and to re-evaluate the best approach every few years.

Comment Apple is rich enough to choose its own fate (Score 1) 251

If only Apple had the money to buy their own infrastructure...

Apple is a very rich company with $200bn+ in the bank. They got that way by taking every opportunity to grow their business. Nothing wrong with that. But sometimes that entails doing things that might not be in their best long-term interests.

Consider this: they chose to buy cloud services from other vendors because their business was growing beyond their ability to provision these services in-house. They could have chosen to do it themselves, preserving the integrity of their infrastructure, but that would run the risk of not being able to scale it out as fast as their customers demanded it, and limited their growth.

So they made the choice to outsource, maximizing their growth but taking the risks that come with that approach.

They could have taken the other path and kept their integrity. They are one of the few companies rich enough to do that. But it's not in their DNA, and their stockholders would take a dim view.

So now they have to take pictures of motherboards in the hope that they catch the bad guys doing something. Pathetic really.

Submission + - BBC optimising UHD video streaming over IP

johnslater writes: A friend at the BBC has written a short description of his project to deliver UHD video over IP networks. The application bypasses the OS network stack, and constructs network packets directly in a buffer shared with the network hardware, achieving a ten-fold throughput improvement. He writes: "Using this technique, we can send or receive uncompressed UHD 2160p50 video (more than 8 Gbps) using a single CPU core, leaving all the rest of the server's cores free for video processing." This is part of a broader BBC project to develop an end-to-end IP-based studio system.

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