Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

As time progresses, things change, sometimes for the better in the right direction, sometimes a step backwards, and sometimes just different enough to be annoying. I wrote my blog post about [A Box Full of Floppies] a week ago, and posted in Monday. Let's take a look at how time and change impacted that one post.

The weather has warmed up here in Tucson so I started my Spring Cleaning early this year...

If there is ever a good time to brag about how beautiful the weather here in Tucson, it would be when everyone else in the country is digging themselves out of piles of snow. When my friends on Twitter were complaining how cold it was in Scottland, Ireland, Canada, or the East Coast of the United States, I would remind them that I am wearing a tee-shirt and shorts.  I played golf for a week last December!

Sadly, a few days after my post, Tucson had the coldest days of February, breaking records set back in the year 1899. Water pipes were frozen, outdoor plants have suffered, and over 14,000 homes and businesses were shut off from natural gas. The 1,400-plus employees at the IBM Tucson facility have been asked to telecommute until restroom facilities can be restored to working order.

While we should all pay more attention to [climate change], this latest chill is probably just a seasonal flucation thanks to [La Niña] that happens every 10-15 years.

Here is a YouTube video of an astronaut ejecting a floppy disk...

Back in 2009, YouTube decided to [stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)] to view its videos. However, that is what most IBMers were on, and this posted a problem when I embedded a video on my blog. To get around that, my friends at Microsoft provided special "conditional HTML tags" that allows me to suppress YouTube videos when viewed from Internet Explorer. The video shows up for those using Chrome, Opera, Firefox or other browsers, but is suppressed for IE users, and that allowed IBM employees to at least read the text.

Fortunately, last July, IBM decided to switch from IE6 over to Mozilla Firefox as the standard browser, so I thought this would no longer be an issue.

Unfortunately, my friends at YouTube have done it again. They changed the generated embed code from using "object" tags to "iframe" which messes up blogs written in various blogging systems, including Lotus Connections that I have here on DeveloperWorks, as well as WordPress. The new method is intended to either promote the new HTML5 standard, or to piss off [iPhone users]. In any case, several readers found they could not read my entire post about floppies because the "iframe" prevented the rest of the post to be shown. I have since reverted back to the old "object" tags and re-posted for everyone's benefit.

I may have to stand up an OS/2 machine just to check out what is actually on those floppies...

For any data that you keep for long term retention, it is important that you be able to access the data in a meaningful way when you need it. IBM has identified five ways that this can be done:

• Museum approach -- keep old servers, storage and applications around. In my case, I have computers that can handle 3.5-inch floppy diskettes, but no hardware to read my Zip cartridges or 5.25-inch floppies.
• Emulation approach -- emulating old systems with new systems. I remember the first CD players had "tape cassette" attachements so they can be used in car stereos.
• Migration approach -- migrating data and applications to new technology. This is what most businesses do. For example, if you keep archives through IBM Tivoli Storage Manager or DFSMShsm, the software will migrate data from old tapes to new tapes as part of its tape reclamation process.
• Descriptive approach -- including sufficiently descriptive metadata, such as with HTML or XML tags, that would enable future rendering.
• Ecapsulation approach -- encapsulate the data, metadata and related application logic for future processing. While the "descriptive" approach might help display the contents of proprietary formats, the encapsulation approach would include application logic, perhaps written in Java, that could be used to actually operate built-in macros, pivot tables, or other active features of a document or database.

IBM Research is working closely with industry standards groups, like the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards [OASIS], to help promote the use of open standards for long-term retention.

For my readers who follow American Football, enjoy the [SuperBowl]!

technorati tags: IBM, La+Nina, floppy, diskette, astronaut, YouTube, archive, OASIS, climate change, global warming, inconvenient truth