Emrys said:
Where do you work? 60 drives in one array? That is a lot of data.
National En-Route Centre, UK.
We control (well I don'r personally I just wrote the software
) all aircraft flying to/from or over the UK, i.e about 90% of all transatlantic aircraft and at least 40% of all inter European traffic as London is one of the main hubs.
The drives are where we store all inter system network flow, error logs, operator interactions, copies of all data coming into and out of the system from Radar for example and, more importantly for me, a ton of debugging information.
We keep about one months worth on the RAID boxes (yes plural, we have backups on separate power supplies just in case the National grid should fail AND the backup generators don't switch in time. Then the data is transferred to tapes (and boy are they big tapes, they are about 4 times the size of standard VHS tapes and can contain 24 hours of high definition analogue video or about 300 hours of DV, dunno how much a player would cost you though.
Our real-time network has over 500 always up 24/7 RS6000 boxes, over 200 of which are traffic control workstations of which around 80 are in use at any one time by air traffic control staff, they have 36 inch square screens (i.e a yard on each side, Sony flat screen on a huge scale) and each controller has a complete spare that he can just get up and walk to in case someone throws a chair through his (they can get a bit stressed
).
Every single box on the system has at least one always on replacement and we have a training system about 1/3 the size of the main system which also doubles as an emergency back up.
Do you feel much safer about flying now?
Amen-Moses