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The ADIC cross platform product is called StorNext Its very fast, only caveat outside the 2K/per node price :) is that they have been slow to release a driver for 2.6 kernels. The latest supported kernel is 2.4.21 RH-ES I believe.

I'm asking myself exactly the same question.. what's the likely price per unit.. because the bigger question is Is this the new price leader for large-scale storage? Currently, disk is about $0.40/GB ($80 for a 200GB disk) and tape is $0.25/GB ($50 for a 200GB LTO2 tape). While these will definitely fall by the time these disks come out, they probably can't come close to 6 or 4 cents per gig.

Plus, though tapes are pretty cost effective on a per gig basis, the actual machines for accessing them are tres expensivo. Look at the ADIC Scalar series. A Scalar 24 costs about 10k. Now consider that a 400 CD changer goes for ~$200 at Amazon... That's currently in a different market segment, but for how long? Even when the CD changer makers decide to price gauge the data consumer, they won't be able to go too far without being outcompeted from below.

That means the ETA to a, let's say $50k petabyte system, is a couple of years.

E.g. let's say the Blue-Rays get up to 200GB each at a price point of $10 each (conservative). That's 5000 discs for 1PB and so $50k, which is much better than the alternative medias by a factor of between 2 (tape) and 5-20 (offline and online disk). But more importantly, it will take only 10 cheap disk changers to access all 5000 disks needed.

The one big gotcha here is that the discs are write-once, read-many. But for certain applications, e.g. video, this is ideal. And it just so happens that folks like Microsoft's Chief Researcher, Jim Gray, think that video is what we'll fill this next generation of capacity with.

Right now there are a lot of file systems that do somehing not all that different than what Sun is proposing. The project I am on is evaluating them as we speak for a center wide filesystem. I've had the fun (no sarcasm, honestly) of setting up a number of different onces and helping to run benchmarks and tests against each. All of them have strengths. Every single one of them has some nasty weaknesses.

If you are looking for an open source based cluster file system, Lustre is what you want. It's supported by LLNL, PNNL, and the main writers at ClusterFS Inc. It's a network based cluster FS. We've been using it over GigE. However, we've found that there needs to be a ratio of 3:1 for data server:clients for a ratio. Wehave only used one metadata server. Failover isn't the greatest. Quotas don't exist. it also makes kernel mods (some good and bad) to do a mild fork of the linux kernel (they put them into the newer kernels every so often). It only runs on Linux. Getting it to run on anything else looks...scary.

GPFS runs on AIX and Linux. Even sharing the same storage. It runs and is pretty stable. it has the option to run in a SAN mode or network based FS. In the latter form, it even does local discovery of disks via labels so that if a client can see the disks locally it will read and write to them via FC rather than to the server. It, however, is a balkanized mess. It requires a lot more work to bring up and run: there is an awful lot of software to configure to get it to run (re: RSCT. If you haven't had the joys of HATS and HAGS, count yourself very, very lucky).

ADIC's StorNext software is another option. This one is good if you are interested in ease of installation, maintanence, and very, very fast speeds (damn near line speed on Fibre channel). I have set this one up for sharing disks in less than two hours from first install to getting numerous assorted nodes of different OS's to play together (Solaris, AIX, Linux). It freakin on virtually everything from Crays to Linux to Windows. It's issues seem to be scaling (right now doesn't go past 256 clients) and it has some nontrivial locking issues (righting to the same block from multiple clients, and parallel I/O to the same file from multiple clients if you change the file size).

There are some others that are not as mature. Among them are Ibrix, Panasas, GFS, and IBM's SANFS. All of them are interesting or promising. Only SANF looks like it runs on more than Linux though at this point. Our requirements for the project I am on are to share the same FS and storage instance among disparate client OSes simultaneously. This might not be the same for others though and these might be worth a look. Lustre dodges this because its open source and they're interested in porting.

Uninstalling a patch is a really bad idea? Then Why The Fuck does Microsoft encourage and recommend the practice?

So let's see. System bluescreens 10 minutes after boot with patch installed. Oh no, better not uninstall that patch, it's a bad idea! Whatever you say, wackjob.

The bad idea is to immediately install the patch on Day 1, because of widespread problems caused by every other fscking Windows patch. This is why Windows worms spread, because nobody can trust Microsoft to actually TEST their patches with REAL WORLD applications, so we all have to hold our breath and pray, or if you're working for a company with far, far too much money, have identical servers & hardware for all the ones that will be patched setup in a test environment and install the patch there, then test. I mean, that's so common and simple, right, and hey, who doesn't have enough money for two of these, and if one goes completely unused except for testing patches, hey, come on, it's a pittance. Microsoft says so!

Since you did not state a retrieval time or storage/retention needs, I am going to offer to scenarios; one for long term, fast access storage, one for short term and/or slow access storage.

Storing 8TB/day for a long time with quick access would probably require a tape silo, which is essentially a tape library the size of a small house. StorageTek is one of the leaders in silos (And might be the only vendor making them these days.), and they make some pretty nice stuff. Their PowderHorn 9310 is a nice model for bulk storage and quick recovery. A downside to the silos is that they do not often handle DLT tapes, which can make it hard to use tapes outside of the library.

If you do not need fast access to the data, and have time to root through tapes for restores, just get a smaller tape library (Anything in the 50-100 tape range from ATL/Quantum Adic or Qualtstar running SuperDLT drives controlled by Veritas Netbackup would give you an easy way to handle all the data. NetBackup has excellent archiving capabilites (IE record data, wipe data from disk.), works on just about any platform out there, scales well, and keeps files in GNUTar format for easy access. As for storing the tapes themselves, if you have a small retention time just keep around a few hundred tapes to cycle through. If you need to store the data for a long time, get a few thousand tapes and a set of nice shelves to keep them on. If you do not have somewhere to store them, Iron Mountain does a great job storing data, I have worked with them before and toured one of their facilities, and I can vouch that they do a great job storing data.

Try tape autoloaders using Sony's rather expensive AIT-2 format: 50GB (uncompressed) raw capacity per tape. Small format, so a smaller capacity autoloader cartridge can be easily couriered off-site.

Some AIT-2 library links for more info:

• Sony's autoloaders (4 tapes per cartridge, 1 drive).
• Tapelibrary.com's offerings (12 to 360 tape libraries, up to 12 drives).
• Of course, for true storage freaks in all formats, nothing can beat ADIC libraries, and while their higher capacity AIT libraries (up to 46,656 tapes, 256 drives) are not exactly portable, they do have more reasonably sized machines as well (11 tapes, up to 2 drives).

Anyway, the point is that solutions do exist for those people worrying about the expanding MP3 collections on their drives and all that money in their bank accounts...

Try tape autoloaders using Sony's rather expensive AIT-2 format: 50GB (uncompressed) raw capacity per tape. Small format, so a smaller capacity autoloader cartridge can be easily couriered off-site.

Some AIT-2 library links for more info:

• Sony's autoloaders (4 tapes per cartridge, 1 drive).
• Tapelibrary.com's offerings (12 to 360 tape libraries, up to 12 drives).
• Of course, for true storage freaks in all formats, nothing can beat ADIC libraries, and while their higher capacity AIT libraries (up to 46,656 tapes, 256 drives) are not exactly portable, they do have more reasonably sized machines as well (11 tapes, up to 2 drives).

Anyway, the point is that solutions do exist for those people worrying about the expanding MP3 collections on their drives and all that money in their bank accounts...

So use redundancy. RAIT is the tape equivalent of RAID for disks. Basically, your data is written across an array of tapes with varying amounts of redundancy (from simple parity, all the way up to mirrored ECC stripes, depending on how much you want to spend :-). There uses to be a CLARiiON DLT array, but since EMC's buyouy of Data General, that seems to have been discontinued. Still, there are plenty of other suppliers of tape arrays. Here's one from Adic, and here's one from Compaq.