Re: Warning of major NHS IT overspend

[Ian G Batten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

On Tue, 02 Nov 2004, Brian Beesley wrote:
> Digital storage - in volume - is going to consume a lot of electrical power, 

Not if it's in an HSM environment.  You could, for example, hold current
patients' records in nice fast FC disks, but move archival stuff to
arrays of SATA drives which are only spun up when accessed.

And that aside, current technology is about 0.04W/GByte, which means
that a Petabyte consumes less than 50KW.  You're going to have to do
better than that as a reason not to do it.

> which has an associated fire risk. If nothing else, capacitors in
> power supplies fail catastrophically; however carefully systems are
> designed, there will inevitably be occasions when an uncontained fire
> results.

I've asked around my peers with responsibility for machine rooms,
apropos the risk analysis of having fire suppression in the room vs not
having it, and none of them had ever seen a machine room fire.  NEBS
compliant kit would further reduce the risk.

> I believe the use of cellulose acetate as a film base was discontinued 
> several decades ago.

Sunset Boulevard was the last Hollywood film to be shot on non-safety
stock.

ian