I'm thinking it's a company in the media realm and I can tell you our marketing department is the only place other than the datacenter or the network core where we've considered 10Gb due to the size of files they deal with. 802.11ac will end up below 100Mbps for a crowded office which is just going to suck when dealing with multi-hundred MB PSD files of worse video.

I do use triple headed monitors for day to day admin, but I can do a hell of a lot with my smartphone, just the other day I rebooted an entire non-production application stack from my phone while we were at lunch =)

Considering a full Solidworks license costs about 80% of the salary of an engineer I don't think it's being used too much in outsourced positions, the productivity hit would make the licensing dwarf the salary savings.

Actually in the law enforcement community they're always called less lethal and always have been, only uninformed idiots (sadly often including 'journalists') call them non-lethal.

Disabling ABS doesn't disable the brakes, it just disables the pulsing and additional wet weather control that ABS brings. Trust me, I've driven a car with a faulty ABS module while the dealership waited for parts to come in and I had zero problem stopping.

Which is of course when planes are at their most vulnerable and most reliant on their instrumentation...

Police officers using lawful force in the course of their duties are generally immune from lawsuits, as are the departments that hire them. It's not like stop sticks, tazers, batons, teargas, flashbangs or firearms are inherently safe but we allow law enforcement to use them against suspected criminals on a daily basis.

It doesn't require 100% accurate flawless decisionmaking all the time, it requires skill when driving it on the ragged edge WHICH SHOULD ONLY BE DONE AT A TRACK, they died because they pushed a car too hard on public streets which is Darwin having his way with idiots.

Dude, if you think a hundred TB dataset has gigs of change then you work in an odd, odd world. Our dataset is relatively static (probably 80% of data is >30 days old) and we still can't keep up with everything using 20Mbps (ie 1.2TB per week), we have to exclude all database and mail from our DR replication set (they replicate at the application layer but using backup software our tertiary backup has to be to tape as the bandwidth bump on both sides is too expensive by comparison). Also dedupe is oversold, for some datasets it works well, for others it is essentially useless, any kind of media file or binary storage format is going to give you optimistically around 1.2:1 dedupe, not the 20:1 given on the tin. Trust me, I tried just about every solution on the market and ended up using disk for landing the backups, network replication for file server data with low change rates, and everything else goes to tape.

As far as the long term retention question, LTO will read two previous generations of tape, for us this has meant our current tape drives can read tapes from around 7-8 years ago. For something like the LHC they're probably using the StorageTek T10000 format, the predecessor format, 9840 offered 14 years of backwards read compatibility and the T10000 has offered 7 years and four generations so far.

Who uses a NAS for backup? I was comparing using external disk for backup versus tape in a library.

Kindof, a single file restore takes about a minute in a decent library, that some file restore using an external HDD that isn't already attached to the server (and thus not really a backup) will be far longer for most organizations. Now try to restore files from a dozen systems from 5 different dates, if your volume is of any size that's going to be far faster using a tape library than a bunch of external HDD's.

That's where disk to disk to tape comes in, feed the disk drives from your primary source and then spool off to tape as fast as the tape will go. Generally this involves something like an incremental forever strategy which just backs up the changes each day and then makes new synthetic full backups on a regular basis so the number of tapes required for a restore is reasonable. Basically you use tape for archive/retention and disk for your primary backup and restore. Tape also gives you offsite and offline backups.

You don't need 10k slots for tape to make sense, even with 48 slots and a 2 month retention period tape makes a hell of a lot more sense than disk for offsite storage. Basically right now if your backup requirement is in the 10's of TB range tape overtakes disk for cost with any reasonable retention period.

And since it's from Symantec expect exactly zero support beyond "is it plugged in" level scriptbots. We dumped Netbackup after over a decade of use due to the fact that even with a $200k purchase on the line and a regional VP involved we couldn't get effective support.

Ditto, we just let go our JDE CNC, who was also responsible for Oracle BI and Oracle Hyperion and did some day to day DBA work on Oracle and SQL and managed the outsourced DBA firm we used. There is probably not another person on the planet with that particular skillset but when we go to hire his replacement we'll probably want as many checked off as possible to reduce the time to get productive since right now we're paying an army of consultants to perform the various duties. The job pays 6 figures in a part of the country with significantly below average cost of living so pay won't be the barrier to finding a candidate, it'll be skillset.