320 Gig HD in 1U Of Rack Space

Mn3m0nic writes "Maxtor today announced a 320 gig rack mounted network storage server that fits in 1U (1.75") of rack space or 1 terrabyte in 5.25"." 14 bucks a gig. Can you stream video over a 100Mbs ether comfortably? Perhaps this is the backend for your DeCSS based DVD Jukebox? Or the mega Tivo extra hard drive (I s'pose that'd take some work tho). But you could fit a hundred or so movies on there... we're just inching towards it now.

Comments

The question you should all be asking.

[TrevorB]

As a sysadmin, the real question you should be asking:

"How the F**K do I back this thing up?!?!?!"

Sure it fits into a tiny rack mount, but the 25 tape DLT with robotic arm changer will take up the rest of the room!!! (OK, they have these things down to the size of a small refrigerator, but you get my point...)

Re:The question you should all be asking.

[SuiteSisterMary]

Oh, I don't know. How about, maybe, a professional tape backup solution, instead of the 40/80 tape drive that comes in your Dell?

The 430 occupies just two cubic feet and five units of rack space. Drawing on M2's industry-leading combination of capacity, performance and compact size, the 430 tape library offers users the highest rack density, minimizing the use of costly data center space and reducing the overall cost of ownership. The Exabyte 430 accommodates up to four M2 tape drives and 30 data cartridges, delivering up to 1.8 TB (4.5 TB compressed*) of capacity and 173 GB/hour (432 GB/hour compressed) of data throughput.

All you need is an intern to swap out the tapes every morning.

No, those numbers are off

[hawk]

The 5.25" unit is a wonderful breakthrough, as we no longer need to use 8" winchesters on these desktop microcomputers. However, the OS just isn't up to it.

For a mere $5,000, the revolutionary corvus 5mb drive stores an amazing five *mega*bytes (thats 5,120 K) on your desktop. Unfortunately, dos 3.3 is quite insistant that disks are 143k, so this appears to your Apple as 35 separate disks on the same controller. There are rumors that the upcoming ProDOS will be able to use a disk this size, but this is rank speculation. Other rumors suggest that a revision to the new IBM PC will allow it to use similar units.

With such technology already here, we can only wonder what 1983 will bring. For now, though, we can certainly use this price effective--only $1/kbyte--mass storage.

:)

Expensive.

[Wakko Warner]

I could build a 3U Linux or BSD machine with a couple Promise IDE cards in it and 4 80 gig IDE drives for about $1200 or so. Maxtor wants $4500!

Hmm, what will *I* use for *my* mp3 server?

Also, that page is one of those God-forsaken meta-refresh-is-zero-seconds pages. Sites that keep pulling you back suck ass.

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Re:Expensive.

[stripes]

I could build a 3U Linux or BSD machine with a couple Promise IDE cards in it and 4 80 gig IDE drives for about $1200 or so. Maxtor wants $4500!

Yep. It is cheper because doing it yourself is almost allways cheaper. Plus it is chepaer because it is three times the size. Sometimes that is a great tradeoff. Other times rack space is expensave (sometimes MORE then $1000/U/month). Frequently expensave enough to make a 1U vs. 3U diffrence worth many $1000s in a single year. Sometimes in just a month. Try pricing telco colos someday.

Of corse there are lots of places where rack space is dirt cheap, and using 3U vs. 1U to save a little money is a no-brainer.

The big problem is space tends to be an inelastic commodity. Run out of disk space? Buy more! Run out of space space? Oops, it takes months to set up a new lease and get it connected and... In fact just evecting people from their office/cubes so we can grow the machine room takes time...

So space starts out cheap, and gets incresingly costly as you consume it. Sometimes you have to go back and replace the 3U disk boxes with 1U disk boxes, and the 3U SPARCs with 1U SPARCs, and sell off the old ones (if they retain any value). At least the new stuff costs way less then it would have when you first did the build-out...

Re:Expensive.

[stripes]

If rackspace can cost $1000/U/month, then don't ya think it would be a good idea to find a better site for the boxen ?

Multiple OC-12s are rather expensave arn't they :-) Seriously that figure is 3 to 4 years old, and for a high bandwidth location with forced air cooling and 3 day battery backup. I don't know what current figues are, I would expect them to be much lower in many places.

My original point was merely that some places are really really expensave, and paying an extra $3500 to save 2U of rack space has a payback time mesured in months (two in this case).

Heck, if that's what rackspace is going for these days, I'm converting my apartment into a colo facility =)

You need a lot of bandwidth coming in to the facility, from multiple providers. Or at least on multiple fibre bundles. Better still if you are centrally located (to minimise lantency to both coasts). Lots of good places in the center of the USA to get land cheep, not so hard to find major switching centers (cheeper circuits), but kinda hard to find places close to multiple telcos.

The other route to being a high cost colo is to have lots of ISPs show up where you are (like MAE-east/MAE-west), but those are hard to start, you normally have to bring a bunch of bandwith to the party and peer cheep for a while...

And battery and/or gennerator back up is a must. Forced air cooling is very good. Humidity control is a must (normally the cooling does that for you, but just in case you want a alaska colo, you still need to control moisture even if cooling is taken care of by nature). Apartments tend not to provide much cooling, so ration out a big cunk of the bedroom for a chiller. They also don't normally have raised floor/drop ceiling, so chop off some more space to install them (or use all ladder racks and overhead cable runs, but you still need space for the cable runs).

You'll be better off renting wharehouse space... (esp if you can find it close to a CO).

Also rember Hurricane Eletric does way cheep rack space, and other places too...

Doh!

[peterdaly]

We just bought 1 160gig, and 4 240 gigs! Shoulda waited another month. Anyway, here is my 60 second review.

They work great for storing this that don't require harddrive access speed, such as images (in my case...and no, not pr0n), or mp3's. They have a 10/100baseT connection to the network, and can share using nfs, or smb.

Bad: No Raid-5. This means your are forced to have at the least 2 volumes, at the most 4. One large volume would be nice. Also, you can't do both nfs and smb on the same share..either one or the other.

On the other hand...these things run freebsd and are hackable (in the good meaning of the term.) When I couldn't get the admin java applet to load on my system (my browser is hosed) I was able to telnet into the sucker and change the IP using vi to edit the text files on the system. I am sure with a little work, these things could be made into some interesting devices. I was thinking Apache/PHP in my case. Would make a hell of a web server for my low usage/high storage situation.

For the situations I mentioned they are good for, I highly recomend them. The price per meg can't be beat, but I question how good they would be for a general purpose envirnment where users would access them directly. The freebsd w/ telnet access is a plus.

-Pete

MP3 Server

[blueg3]

By the RIAA's calculations, that's enough to make an on-campus MP3 server that can hold almost 82,000 songs. Then, they could sue for over 2 billion dollars (at 25 grand per "copyright infringement"). Cool!

1 Terrabyte

[Alan Livingston]

"...that fits in 1U (1.75") of rack space or 1 terrabyte in 5.25"

Precisely how many bytes is a terrabyte? Is it a single terrestrial byte? Perhaps one byte as big as the earth? Maybe a byte made of dirt?

I don't want a byte made of dirt. Perhaps I shall give it a squirt! Squirt that dirt!

But I digress...

640Gb?

[Syberghost]

Hey, if this thing is 320Gb of Raid 1, that means it's got 640Gb of drives in it.

That means if you could turn off the Raid mirroring, you can double the capacity.

Wonder if it could be converted to Raid 5; assuming it's 8 HDs of 80Gb each, you could get 560Gb out of it with Raid 5.

I wonder if I can get any more possibly false assumptions based on limited data from a press release into this post?

-

14 bucks a gig for a DeCSS DVD jukebox? HA!

[IntelliTubbie]

Hmm ... or, alternatively, you could spend $20 a pop to buy the actual DVDs, for less than 10 bucks a gig!!! (Possibly much less, depending on the length of the movie.)

This sort of bass-ackwards thinking reminds me of the classic Onion article: New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System Downloads Real-Time TV Programs, Displays Them On Monitor.

"Yes, the image is somewhat grainy and limited to just six frames per second," Welborne said. "But the technology will only improve as 466 MHz processors with more efficient Pipeline Burst Cache and Accelerated Graphics Ports with 10 MB VRAM become standard in the consumer marketplace. And when they do, the images will be remarkably crisp and detailed, every bit as good as that of, say, a 19-inch Philips-Magnavox TV."

"This is incredible," said Wayne Messers, a Huntington Beach, CA, systems analyst who sampled the Presario 6000 last weekend at the National Computer And Electronics Expo in San Diego. "I'm watching TV, but there's a keyboard in front of the screen."

Cheers,
IT