Jon Ericson's questions

Every summer we have to shut down some equipment due to a combination of outside temperature and high load. The air conditioners just can't keep up. As we cycle in new equipment and cycle out old, it would be nice to know if we are making our cooling problem better or worse. Even better, I'd like to be able to calculate a rough estimate of the amount of cooling we'll need to support our equipment at high load.

Is there any rule of thumb or calculation to determine how much cooling capacity will be required?

We've backed up our data on LTO tapes for years and it's a real comfort to know we have everything on tape. A sister project and one of our data providers have both moved to 100% disk storage because the cost of disk has dropped so much. When we propose systems to potential customers these days we tend to downplay or not mention our use of tape systems for data storage since it might seem outdated.

I feel more comfortable with having data saved in two separate formats: disks and tape. In addition, once data is securely written to tape, I feel (perhaps naively) that it's been permanently saved. Not having to rely on a RAID controller to be able to read back data is another plus for me.

Do you see a place for tape backup these days?