Large Scale Solid State Memory Storage?

spacechicken asks: "I am doing a theoretical study of an extremely secure large scale data storage concept. Due to the nature of the (theoretical) location of the (theoretical) warehouse some of our constraints include very few (if any) service visits, complete remote administration and no moving parts. Does anyone have any experience using or information on large scale (on the order of 10^12 - 10^15 bytes) deployment of solid state storage? And to preempt those who will say it - I have Googled."

Comments

Question

[Thrasymachus Online]

The interesting part about your question is the complete lack of background on why you would possibly need all this storage.

So I'll make a guess. 10^12--10^15 bytes is a large range. And I can only think of a few ways to generate that much data. The most probable is video cameras, but I can't think of any reason why you would need it secure in that fashion.

Secure without human intervention is interesting. I mean, if all you want is security, the easy way is distributed networks and encryption. And really, that would be more secure in the event of nuclear war or other similar events.

So I have two guesses:

A) Given the similarity of your numbers to the 10^11 neurons in the human brain (and each neuron has as many as 1000 connections to its neighbors) this is some sort of screwy immortality thought experiment.
B) Given the security requirements, this is some screwy thought experiment involving the preservation of the sum of human knowledge over a vast stretch of time without human presence. That could be interstellar travel, say, or large disasters wiping out the human race.

Ok, what about other problems?

[Klaruz]

Using solid state drives you could probobly do it on the order of about a half billion dollars. Possible indeed. But there are other things you haven't thought of. You didn't say if you need to have this thing on 24/7, but I'm going to assume you do.

1: Power. Solid state drives tend to forget stuff when shut off, so you'll need a UPS in the data center to handle it. No biggie, except when you realize that the batteries are going to need maintence. They do go bad after a while, I know of no batteries that don't. In theory you could do flash memory instead of volitile for about 3 times the cost (512meg ATA flash storage is $300 on pricewatch, add raid, san, etc, pricey but possible)

2: Cooling. Massive amounts of solid state chips are going to generate massive amounts of heat. This means water chillers (most likely) and fans. Both involve moters. Moters go bad. You can build redundent, but eventually both cooling systems will go out.

3: The hardware it's self. CPUs go bad, controllers blow up, ram chips go out, power supplies blow, etc. You can only leave a redundant system alone for so long until it's no longer redundant.

4: Acts of god. Floods, fire, lack of fuel for power, emi. These things happen. You can build two data centers in seperate locations and write one off when something bad happens, but then you're back to no redundancy.

5: Murphy's law. Don't forget, Murphy always wins.

Having worked on a LARGE scale redundent system (Think uncle sam), I can tell you these things do require maintence. Building a system that large without bugs that creep up in a few years time is going to be next to impossible.

That said, it sounds neat. Let me know when you guys need an engineer to build it, it'd be fun.

Look At Me!

[Llama Keeper]

SARCASM

Look at me Mom, I got my question posted on Slashdot by makin up some bogus and totally illogical question. Then I made tons of vauge references and quasi-logical posts to make people wonder. Ooh ooh ooh look at me!

/SARCASM