Playing For Keeps

This article discusses how secure archiving systems ensure that a company’s valuable data is kept safe. Many companies rely on an old standby, magnetic tape, as their backup medium because it holds a lot of information for the investment. Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, and Seagate Technology LLC have jointly put forward a format they call Linear Tape-Open (LTO), a format to be shared through an open-licensing process. This way the customers can buy hardware and software from several suppliers, and read all their files, regardless of the brand of equipment they were recorded on. In short, the developers hope to make it easier for customers to choose and use data-storage products. Kinematic elements for motion and stress simulation behave dynamically like regular solid elements and can transmit forces, but stresses are not calculated for these elements, so processing times are greatly reduced.