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Hilarious story, thanks for sharing. > "Is the light on the AIT array green or amber?" Can you explain this? What is an AIT array?
by takoid 5y ago
Hilarious story, thanks for sharing.
> "Is the light on the AIT array green or amber?"
Can you explain this? What is an AIT array?
- bombcar 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Intelligent_Tape https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Intelligent_Tape Green = backup worked.
- LgWoodenBadger 5y agoI assume the 3/4-reliable tape drive?
- oceanghost 5y agoAs the others have correctly intuited-- its a tape backup system. We couldn't afford a proper tape library with a robot. I can't remember why, but there was a limitation of the software or SunOS that we needed to be able to get an L0 onto one tape. This thing was two Sony AIT tape machines that had a special SCSI board that made them look like one single drive to the host thus doubling the capacity. It was just enough to skate by. I didn't have much faith in differentials and didn't like to let them run more then a few days as well. I always assumed the fault was in that SCSI board. The hand-off between tape-1 and tape-2 was what usually failed. The problem might occur 24 hours into a backup so it was difficult to get good backups. Also, I was not a full time employee (being a student), so I couldn't babysit this thing 5 days a week like a full time employee. Also, it kind of killed the performance of the system, so I had to do them at odd hours. I am proud to say I never lost a single bit at that job. In essence if this backup had failed months of research would have been lost (maybe two to 4 week old backup x 12 researchers). Anyways, thank you for reading my silly story!