Originally posted by: Future Shock
Originally posted by: racolvin
Why, in this day of electronic communications, would you effing bother sending a tape for heavens sake? If you do a great deal of data exchange between the companies, just put in a decent speed link between them and upload the friggin file already.
Because for sheer high-speed data throughput, NOTHING beats a delivery van loaded with tapes or optical backups. Seriously. I can move tens of petabytes in a delivery van. Try that on even GigaEthernet. Come back next millenium, especially when communications overhead is factored in. And if you want to discuss COSTS...well, we pay quite a substantial sum (VERY substantial) to have a 36Gbit connection to one of our database hosts, and if I was only using it for one update per month to a central agency it would hardly be worth the cost.
While I understand what you're saying, I have to respectfully disagree - mostly because I don't think we're talking about that much data. What is the quantity of data that was shipped for credit reporting purposes? Name, account, balances, SSN, payment history. So what, 1kB per customer? If they had 50 million customers even, we'd only be talking about roughly 52Gbytes of data to transfer once per month?
Moving petabytes via van is great but those tapes/discs still have to be written at the source, packaged,loaded, transported via truck, unboxed, loaded,read, and integrated, making the total time of transfer quite probably no better than 1Gig link between, at least for the amounts of data it would seem to be. I mean, the process of creating, transporting, and reading the tapes takes at least 36-48 hours start to finish since DHL is in the middle and depending on the type of tape technology we're talkin here. Considering we're talking about financial institutions and tape ..omg .. heaven forbid they're the old 9-track 6250bpi tapes that only hold like 200MB
Anyway, I certainly don't know the real quantities of data involved but transmission still would seem to be better than tape for this particular case. <shrug> Since the article only mentioned 2 million names (customer records), lets assume 2kB per record even. That's less than 5G to transfer...
ah well, nvm ... its over with now anyway