Interlinux Blog

A new version of I-D, draft-brasher-ltasp-03.txt has been successfully
submitted by Damian Brasher and posted to the IETF repository.

Filename:         draft-brasher-ltasp
Revision:         03
Title:                 Long Term Archive Storage Protocol
Creation_date:         2010-07-26
WG ID:                 Independent Submission
Number_of_pages: 13

Abstract:
Long-term archiving storage fundamentally begins with archive data
Accumulation, then Geo-duplication and then Management.  Using
A->G->M, LTASP has been created to solve mid-range and below, long-
term archiving requirements of the small-medium enterprise.  Where
tape has been deployed in the past, LTASP now offers an alternative
solution designed to be more robust and manageable in the long term
than network attached storage devices or simple disk storage alone.

The IETF Secretariat.

I’m not a superstitious person but this observation has got me thinking about triangles again. DIASER, as you may know, is a long-term archive system, disaster recovery, in beta-2 phase. Does this bar chart say anything to you?

No, not much. See the whole picture here. From the news you will know that on Tuesday 12th January 2010 a massive earthquake hit Haiti. On 20th April 2010 the BP oil rig explosion occurred. Both locations of these disasters are near, or within, the Bermuda triangle region. The exact location of the Bermuda triangle is open to interpretation. Take a look at the Wikipedia page. Statistics are just statistics and open to misinterpretation; however the graphs above display distinct rise in user activity by March 2010 and now the BP oil disaster has occurred there is a massive drop. Furthermore there was a huge drop in activity in September 2009 shortly after a significant vulnerability in the Linux kernel was discovered on the 13th September 2009. Am I seeing what is not there? Of course, there are many more variables to take into account, so quite possibly. However, it is very possible that the world news affects how different types of software are consumed at any given time. The main point of this is the mind bending, reality law breaking, thought that my life may well have been affected, indirectly, by the Bermuda triangle without even leaving my cosy rural UK based office. The Franco-Bulgarian philosopher; Tzvetan Todorov, states how the breach of our laws of reality might be described in literature, I like it.

– Damian

The changes are as follows:

The manual and other documentation, including images and diagrams, have been updated. The retrieve function now reads zero or more hyphens when used in a volume naming policy.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/diaser/files

To explain the anti-reasoning behind ‘like everlasting tape’ DIASER advertising slogan; this post touches on some mathematics and computer science concepts starting with a small advertising campaign. I needed a way to quickly and cleanly communicate to systems engineers and scientists the purpose of DIASER. I drew a sketch of a strip of tape, that which DIASER is designed to replace, leading into three nodes from a larger data store. The sketch became the image below and the banner logo for www.diaser.org.uk.

never ending tape sketch

I was investigating the deterministic and non-deterministic properties of the DIASER algorithm. My systems analyst studies with Red Hat, an architect course, had been teaching me some stochastic, non-deterministic analysis techniques. To help, a truth table exists to improve DIASER analysis on this blog-site called Data Vitality. In computer science and mathematics the Turing Machine describes a model where extremely complex calculations are theoretically possible. Systems can be modelled and can incorporate random elements or processes and are therefore non-deterministic stochastic models otherwise they are deterministic. I am a systems administrator / programmer learning about stochastic analysis, building models which cope with random variations over time. You know how random computer systems can appear sometimes. The weather is complex in Britain due to many random variable values depending on which variables you know of, can or choose to measure and so is the queue at the local super market, seemingly unrelated systems. Perhaps painting a picture is a stochastic activity, an attempt to incorporate and communicate the unknowns of the artist’s vision, an abstraction.

Computer language scientists work with finite instructions sets. The other part of Turing’s model includes an infinite tape consisting of cells to read and write to. Like DIASER can store an infinite amount of data given infinite time. I double checked the Turing machine definition some weeks after I created the DIASER slogan. But given the stochastic nature of my work the, systems administrator / engineering “para-logic” probably works, doesn’t it?

DLB