[Geodata] multiple baskets for all our eggs

[Schuyler Erle]

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 13:59 -0700, jo at frot.org wrote:
> Telascience is an amazing resource that really does keep on growing
> the more demand we have been able to create. However, this stuff wants
> to be syndicated. I wonder what other (likely academic) organisations
> who already have serious storage infrastructure could offer it freely
> on other continents.

This is a totally realistic concern that keeps getting brought up but
never really gets addressed. My suggestion would be to find institutions
willing to participate in some kind of distributed file system mesh,
ideally one on each continent. Something like Tahoe might suffice for
the purpose, or, heck, for that matter, even MogileFS:

  http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe

  http://www.danga.com/mogilefs/

Databases can be practically distributed in a similar fashion (e.g.
Slony). We have one such institution in North America; add one more in
Europe/UK and one in Japan and maybe one in Australia and maybe one more
in North America (because bandwidth is cheap here) and then we're
talking. The other institutions don't need to front as much disk space
as Telascience has already; so long as we've got enough room to mirror a
copy everything once *somewhere* then nothing will magically disappear
one day.

SDE