My understanding is that the NAVCC (when fully up and running at full capacity) will in fact be
significantly larger then other repositories that you mention. This was mentioned in passing by
several vendors who responded to the RFC for the acquisition of the storage subsystem. I do not
know personally if that is true, but the vendors responding were the players who would have been
in a position to know that kind of information and I have no reason to doubt them. The
repository for NAVCC is however very specialized due to the mission - and there are many things
to look at with repositories on the scale that we are discussing - access for example is an
important area. Some repositories may be smaller in terms of the amount of TB's stored, but may
have very large bandwidth requirements due to the access requirements. Others may be much larger
but could essentially be "dark" archives which collect information but have it only accessed
infrequently - so which is "bigger" depends very much on how you define your terms.
An article on the NAVCC is located here.
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/06078/navcc.html
Jim Lindner
Email: jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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On Dec 13, 2006, at 12:34 PM, Mike Richter wrote:
Jim Lindner wrote:
This is a very interesting post, just one very quick comment. I have been a consultant for the
Library of Congress for about 5 years now - and I can tell you for sure - absolutely - that
those quotations of space are just - well - silly. Since the library does not even have a full
accounting of exactly how large the collection is - and because it grows every minute
(literally) these "estimates" really have absolutely no basis in fact. The Libraries
collection includes many more types of objects then books. And even if you just consider the
books - they are in many different languages - and what about the pictures in the books? There
are illuminated manuscripts. In the National Audio Visual Conservation Center being built in
Culpeper Virginia, the estimate is that many terabytes a day will be generated in the transfer
of analog carriers.
Once upon a time, I had clearance to ask what the traffic and storage numbers were for NSA.
Since I never asked, I may speculate that it would make the LoC's efforts pale in comparison
Mike
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