Bambi meets a 24 terabyte Thumper

The Library recently adopted two 77kg silver boxes named Thumper, AKA x4500, a Sun Microsystems data storage device.

The National Library, the first Sun Centre of Excellence in New Zealand, is also the first New Zealand organisation to deploy the device. For the Library, the increased storage capability is a digital equivalent to building another couple of storeys on the Wellington building. They will triple the Library's current data storage capabilities. Thumper is extremely cost efficient at $1,000 per terabyte; our current primary storage device costs $30,000 per terabyte.

The increased amount of work that we are doing in the area of digital preservation is driving the Library's need for these devices. The Thumpers will be working storage for the National Digital Heritage Archive Programme (NDHA), and projects such as the Mclean Papers and the newspaper digitisation programme.

In parallel, we heard last week from Elliot about new virtual computing services from Amazon. I can't imagine we'd ever give up storing local copies of preservation objects... but distributing access copies around the world on virtual services in an interesting idea.



Apparently, Bambi's metadata was lost in a tragic case of sabotage by a rogue digital archivist at Disney who was also a gun lobby activist [joke!]. If only Thumper and the virtual computing services were around!

Bambi image by araruhiroku0110 on Flickr. Some rights reserved.