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The Ultimate All-In-One Storage Solution
karnifex writes "Filled up your LaCie Bigger Disk already, and looking for a little more storage space? Good news! The Petabox is ready! 'The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).' And luckily, as the Internet Archive notes, it's shipping-container friendly (20' x 8' x 8'). So save on delivery costs and order two!"
woot
cock smokers
GNAA is Dying!!! Die Die Die
My million monkeys at a million terminals will have somewher to save all their potential Shakespeare works.
But the question is, do my monkeys use VI or Emacs? That shall remain a mystery.
Imagine all the Spice Girls' songs you could save on that thing...wow...
MY SECRET DIARIES
is my ass.
...drumroll
Peta-files
if you still enjoy wearing furs??
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
1 petabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, not 1,000,000...
I can think of a few good applications for this much storage ...
Maybe someone should try to sell these boxes to GMail? They will surely need a lot of storage space.
I didn't notice a price specified. Am I just not seeing it? Anyone in a position to give details?
How many LOCs/VW Bug?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I'm skeptical of any promotional website that uses the word "dongle".
haha... dongle
From the article:
PILOT STATUS 5/2004
* The first 100TB Rack is up and running!
* The second 100TB Rack will be up by the end of May
Apparently this is some new use of the word "ready" with which I am not familiar. Neat technology, no doubt, but it doesn't really look like it's ready for prime time just yet.
Will we find one of these things in eBay in 10 years selling for $10 and feel all nostalgic about those days when that amount of storage media was the size of a room?
How many petadollars does it cost?
They only have one rack, which is 100 TB.
If you gave me a 100 mbit line, it would take me over 92 days to fill it up with porn. More if I slept.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
something that can finally hold all of my porn
Can we say, Goooooooooooooooogle?
I find it ironic that the Wayback machine poster is right next to the unit. Do I detect a hidden message? Hmmmm ;)
Life is not for the lazy.
ok, what do you do if you want to use that Lacie disk and share it between a system running WInXP and another running OS X or linux?
any ideas?
Already posted here.
Ah well, all I'd do is fill it up with Simpsons episodes....
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
20 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet eh.... I thought they had that in the 1970s
...storage large enough that in 4 years, everyone will have the terabyte of secondary memory needed for Longhorn!
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
is faxed to the RIAA/MPAA as soon as your order is confirmed so they know where to start looking.
Think someone like the government is going to keep track of who buys these things?
1 petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, not gigabytes...
ResidntGeek
I just updated my old stone disk (it was erroding) with the latest gerbil in a wheel (I couldn't afford the guinea pig) with awesome seek times (he can seek food in less than 30 nanoseconds) and at least double-digit RPMs.
oprah.sln
a few years from now when we have pentabyte hard drives selling for less than the cost of visit to the local grocery store. Look back at this article and say, "I remember when..."
What do I backup my petabox with?
Though it says Linux is the standard OS, I'm hoping they plan on optimizing for Longhorn... so far this is the only system out that can meet Longhorns recommended disk capacity and RAM requirements. ...now if they could only find a way to fit all that into a mini-ATX tower.
If you click on the link for the LaCie disk, you'll see, at the bottom of the page, that it won a 4.5 rating at Macworld in June, 2004.
Did I miss a month in there somewhere?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
20' x 8' x 8' = 1280 cubic feet!
Jesus, that's more volume than the average room in a house! What year is it, 1984?
Good God.
or alternatively
What for?
At least as far as the next year or two is concerned. RIAA has all but outlawed music on the computer and even so, a petabyte of $1.25 songs would cost you more than bill gates makes in a year. If you have a petabyte of home movies, you must be making porno films.. If you have a petabyte of DVD's ripped, you have several life sentences coming, even if you own all the dvd's somehow (more bill gates salary multiples). And if you have text files, then holy grapes batman, youll never read all that in 10 lifetimes.
I can see uses in the comercial realm, buying multiple units in order to backup. But if this is in anyway marketed toward the consumer, only the biggest 'mine has to be bigger than yours' geek would buy something like that right now. I'll probably have one of those on my desk/floor about 5 to 7 years from now when its affordable/realisitic for me.
From the site:
PILOT STATUS 5/2004
* The first 100TB Rack is up and running!
* The second 100TB Rack will be up by the end of May
* Thermal Targets have been met
* Systems Booted from USB Dongle
* Reiser FS running
* PC-based Router running
Maybe I'm missing something but this looks to me like they don't really have a Petabyte of storage working but plans to incorporate a Petabyte of storage with only 100 TB up and running now. Not that 100 TB is anything to brush off.
one petabyte ought to be good enough for anybody
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I guess I'll buy a couple for my porno collection. Hope it's enough room...
Isn't a petabyte 1,048,576GB? I'm not being pedantic here... that's an extra 48,576GB, afterall.
I was just thinking to myself the other day.. where am I gonna get storage solution that'll give me not only a petabyte of storage but more importantly, is also shipping container friendly? ..will wonders never cease!?
How huge is the market for this type of device? I mean seriously.. How many entities were clamoring for this..and how many could they possibly utilize?
So many injustices..so little time..
I know the pull is to get these things as big as you can get but i would love to see hard drives that will work for ever. Now I know everything breaks but I mean in 400 years how is anyone going to know what we were like if all the data on us slowly goes away because the hard drives or the cds don't really last very long
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
will they also supply a petabyte capable backup solution?
I ain't changing the tapes on that thing !!!
Does it run Linux? :)
bash: rtfm: command not found
A beowulf cluster, and all the pr0n!
There, done.
We're so informtaion heavy, will we need things this huge for acrchiving? How will the important stuff be seperated from the chaff (redundant stuff like /. dupes)?
Fritz
______________
Huh?
My quick calc suggests that a petabyte would require about 213,000 DVD-R disks at 4.7 GB/disk. At about 1.2 mm/disk, that's a stack about 255 m (837 ft )high.
I don't even want to think about backing this up on a million some-odd CD-Rs. I suspect that the first CD-R would have rotted long before the last CD-R was written.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
See? Those Longhorn specs are quite easy to achieve... Now let's sit back and wait for Intel or AMD to come up with a 1x1x1m slab of silicon that can melt graphite and run Longhorn at the same time!
Hate me!
1 MILLION GIGS! BAH! That isn't news unless they convert it to some entirely inappropiate metric. How many Library of Congresses is this? How many 128kbps MP3s can you store on it. And most importantly, how many floppy disks is this equivalent too?!
Caffeine Good
Office manager: "Hey, Adam, do you know why our power usage might have gone up this last month?"
I surreptitiously conceal the firewire cable going out the side door.
Adam: "No, John, I haven't the foggiest."
OM: "Ok, well I'll ask Kim when I talk to her about the strange shipping container outside. Thanks."
-Adam
... and pretty soon you're talking REAL storage.
you perverts try to hide your pr0n, but we know what you do with these things...
In his novel 3001 Arthur C. Clarke asserted/speculated that one petabyte would be sufficient space to store a lifetime's memories. (He didn't say if this was compressed.)
So, assuming you can handle the trivial exercise of transferring your memories (the implementation of which is left as an exercise for the reader), immortality is yours for the buying!
The United States of America: We mean well.
MICROSOFT IS SUPPORTING TERRORISM!
All terrorist videos are encoded in Windows Media format. They are all choppy as shit and you can't see any details at all. This terrorizes me, alright....OF WINDOWS MEDIA FORMAT! Good god, I hope I never meet Windows Media in a dark alley.
Isint it great that in 5 years that will probably all fit onto a disc slightly bigger than a penny.
Hey, at least I didnt say (so much pr0n)
Imagine hitting that with a nice heavy dose of degauss. The resulting random data could possibly be a functioning program... Could we create computer life? You'd need to try and find these programs to get them started, but I bet you could create digital life with this puppy.
www.olin.edu
"Rack materials cost is currently estimated to be $121K for 96TB"
= 13509
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id
If you look down in the message list, you see a reference to pdf + ppt docs. Here's another related project Planet Ten Modular Data Centers.
Yes, it's a petabyte once you fill the shipping container. Honestly, I thought of this idea last year (using stock shipping containers), and now I'm fascinated that they've made it happen.
My only suggestion is that this is prototype: the eventual production systems (say, a couple of years time) should have custom shipping containers for:
* any of the side panels can open to access a rack and hot swap failing racks, so there is no need for a middle entry aisle
* the cooling system should be built into the structure, like existing refigerant containers
* not just data storage, but also computing facilities
This is totally unnecessary. EVERYONE knows we only need 640k
MY SECRET DIARIES
This is just in time for me to start my HD porn archive!
Yeah, they did, but that was the gigabyte model. This is the petabyte model now.
It's all just symantics. Nothing new.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
640 KB ought to be enough for anybody.
-Bill G., ca 1980
Duke Nukem Forever is "ready"!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
That's a lot of porn in one space.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd love to see an equivalent to all the benchmarking websites out there for telling me what hardware is reliable, and not just fast. I already know what the fastest drives, fastest video card, quietest fans, etc. are, but which ones last longest? Which drives *never* have failures that affect real data? Which cables are properly certified and insulated for high-volume transfer in a confined space rubbing up against other cables? Etc.
If you know of such a site, tell me.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of the BIGGEST problems with current filesystem technology is that they *all* do a very poor job when it comes to crash recovery, when you start talking over a terabyte of storage.
/lost+found alone, with another 8 million in various directories under that.
Someone PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong, but all the UNIX/Linux filesystems still just merrily dump things in lost+found, with NO organization of the files.
I've seen, litterally, over 4 Million files in
Things get *real* ugly when you try to recover from that. find, tar, cpio, ls and other normail utilities ALL break down when you are dealing with a situation like this.
There needs to be a better system. Current UNIX and Linux technology just can't handle it.
So if you move into this space, the only viable solution right now is to make certain you have excellent backups, which is another issue in itself
sound like a technical 'zine for animal rights advocates?
> get tea
No Tea: dropped.
will find a way to fill it up... ;-)
Oh well, what the hell...
Of course, you have to figure in that by Petabyte, they mean 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Of couse, the actual formatted capacity is much less.
1,000,000,000,000,000/(1024^4) yields only about 909.5 TB. Correct me if I am mistaken.
...
It's right there under the pictures :
http://capricorn-tech.com/
The site is rather empty right now, but it seems this is the company that will market this petabyte machine... er... box... er... whatever the name is.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I'm guessing they were referring to themselves, not google.
Please help metamoderate.
sorry but it's kinda required.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
..in 10 years what are the odds that you'll lose a [ disk | holographic cube | whatever ] with that much storage capacity down the back of the sofa.
And you won't care because it'll be less effort to format a new one than hunt for the old one.
Very nice, clean design overall. I'd like to know who the supplier was for the rack cases, or if they had them made custom. I've seen the half cases with the ports on the front before, but I have not been able to locate a US supplier.
It appears that the nodes are half sized, allowing for 40 systems per side, or 80 systems total. The null modem console cables connecting node pairs together is clever... if any one machine fails, you can restart it as long as its neighbor is still alive.
Mark
I think we're all jaded. This is a device that's big enough to archive the contents of every library in the world and we're complaining about the fact it won't fit in our front pocket.
monkeys eventually write both vi and emacs while working on shakespeare
Yeah, ok, we're all making fun of this type of product. But, lot's of businesses really care about this kind of thing. Forget google. Think about an airline. They need to store boatloads of information every day- flight arrival/departure info, passenger names, etc, and this information is never deleted.
You have a situation in which your probably accumulating MBs or GBs of new information every day and you need to store all of it for a long time. A PB of storage is nothing for this type of application. Same deal for target/wallmart -- inventory stats, every transaction at every register, etc. Storage is a big deal for a lot of business-types. Find a way to make storage more compact, more easily backed up, etc and theres some real money to be made.
...just mount /dev/random as a petabyte drive. Admittedly it might be hard to find your data in there - but chances are it is in there somewhere.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Good, now I don't need to delete my spam.
yeah, but does it play dvds?
given that monkeys have basically four hands I think they'd be more suited for emacs (alt-meta-control-super-hyper-shift-q) than vi ;-)
I have been using emacs for nearly 10 years now and I swear sometimes I have been seriously considering adding a foot pedal or 2 to my setup (besides control, shift and meta I also routinely use Super and Hyper, xmodmap is great!)
-- the cake is a lie
80 systems, 4 drives system = 320 drives.a tions.ht m
Copan puts 896 drives in one system
http://www.copansys.com/products/specific
oh man, imagine a beowulf cluster of those...;)
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Gimmie the yottabyte drive already!
A trillion Terrabytes!
A quadrillion Gigabytes!
Learn something new.
A Three Letter Agency? Maybe with first letter N and last letter A?
a petabyte is a million gigabytes
No it is NOT you fucked up pathetic MORON.
Christ you are stupid!
of when I first started playing nethack.
I'm heavily involved in a 5-6 year project to use the Arecibo telescope to search for new pulsars. The project uses a new 7-beam receiver system, each of which takes data from up to 1024 nearby frequency channels. The data is 16-bit sampled over 15000 times per second from each frequency channel. We need the time and frequency resolution to find exotic millisecond pulsars.
Over the couse of the survey we expect to take about 1 PB of data. We're still trying to figure out exactly how we will process and store it all.
For more info, you can poke around here.
Actually, it would take more then 925 days :
60sec * 60 sec/min * 60 min/hour * 24 hour/day = 86400
1 PetaByte = 8*10^7 100 MegaBits
80000000 seconds / 86400 seconds/Day = 925.9259259259259 Days
Shipping container friendly ?
(20' x 8' x 8')
Thats fucking huge. Thats the size of a medium bedroom. Maybe a small bedroom, stilll very big.
Where do they get shipping containers this size?
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
you know were going to read about a CEO coming up to one of these, and telling one of his buddys, "Hey, you wanna see a hot swap!?"
These will most likely be primarily used by academic institutions, such as CERN, NASA, and universities who are lucky enough to own particle accelerators. CERN has several petabytes of storage currently, which are housed in silos full of tapes, with rather funky robots which fly around at speed. An average particle collision (single experiment!) will give at least 1GB of data, which will take a considerable amount of time to process into something more managable, and therefore needs storing.
All in all, I think they'll have a few interested clients, but at the same time, most places where they have minds capable of building machines of the magnitude used for these experiments, they tend to be more than capable of building solutions similar to this.
Take a look at this!
download all of kazaa and host your own version of kazaa
If you gave me a 100 mbit line, it would take me over 92 days to fill it up with porn. More if I slept.
yeah, but if you looked closer, it's the same 6 gigs over and over again.
I'm just gonna get 1,000,000 free Gmail addresses and email all my data to myself 1 Gb at a time.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Peta.
How about the doctor analyzing zippy?
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
What kind of math are they teaching the kiddies in school these days? You got confused between m=milli and M=mega.
He said "100 mbit." I assume he meant that in bits per second. 100 mbit/sec is 100 millibits per second. That's 0.1 bits per second. Your numbers are off by a factor of a billion!
Does that make you a petaphile?
[massive karma burn detected]
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
a Beowulf cluster of... ... what? Oh.
In Soviet Russia, old joke redundants you.
Their site claims they are booting off a USB flash dongle key. This sounds neat. I wonder what the boot time is.
Including all revisions, of course.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
I think that's the name of the Pitbull down the street.
Apparently they are using VIA chipsets and CPUs and ReiserFS. Hope they have good backup ;)
You're complaining that these hard drives won't run forever and you're right. Neither will CD's. However, I would also like to point out that the vast majority of ancient egyptian papyrus isn't around today. Also, don't start goign off on using clay or stone tablets, because they break (even the Rosetta stone is broken).
Honestly, computers are still far superior to what we were using before. It's not like we've got Homer's original version of the Illiad sitting in a museum somewhere; we just have many duplicated copies that have been reproduced over the years. You're right that hard drives fail and CDs break, but we can keep updating onto new media. Besides, when a monk drops an iota when transcribing the Bible, Jesus goes from being God to godlike. When a computer adds an iota, the checkbit fails and the data is resent.
Somebody is also going to point out that, as systems change, data can become unreadable. Heck, I had a professor who couldn't update his lab instructions because the software that read the lab printouts wouldn't run on new machines and the fileformat wasn't understood by any other software. So, want to stop our data from becoming unreadable? Well, let's just do what the Etruscans did! Of course, we don't have a clue what they did because nobody can read Etruscan. For a more familiar example, think of heiroglyphics before the Rosetta stone. It's pretty common for data to become lost and unreadable. Also, this bring us back to the solution. Along with the data, include the source code for the software that can read it. If you really want to be anal, you could even include the source to an emulator for the machien it was designed to run on.
Still, you might point out, 400 years from now, we'll still lose 99% of that do to failures of whatever nature. Once again, you would be be right. However, do you honestly believe that we have 1% of all the data that was collected in 1604? Hell, most of the people couldn't even right, so we don't know ANYTHING about their lives. I'm sorry that we can't digitally preserve our wonderous society for all of eternity, but it's completely blind to believe that this makes us in ANY way different to any other culture. Read Percy Shelley's Ozymandias before complaining about how people in the future won't know what our lives were like.
Yeah and maybe we could clone a few of them (a couple scary and sporty spices) for our own conveniences.....hehe.for singing of course
/. a comment like this gets moderated as Interesting instead of the non-creepy Funny. ;-)
Only on
Hopefully it comes pre-formatted in whatever FS the customer wants, otherwise can someone tell me how long this will take to do a full format? hehe.
-- Eekrano
If you expect a hard drive to fail after three years (I'm guessing) but these occurances are randomly distributed (an assumption that will be true after running this thing for a year or two) you can then expect that the 4000 hard drives in this array would have about 3 failures per day. This thing would never be at full speed! it would be constantly restructuring its RAID. Also, it would cost about $300 just in hard drives (not to mention controllers, power supplies, et cetera).
People keep talking about storage clusters done with PC's using 3Ware or other multi-channel SATA RAID cards. I've got nothing against 3Ware - They run several of my "low end" servers at our office, but what we really love are Infortrend boxes.
You're not running a full blown OS on each box, the box is a self contained RAID system. We've deployed several of these boxes to clients, typically using the SCSI-to-SATA boxes (shows as a large SCSI device to the HBA, but is running 16 250G SATA drives (4TB RAW!)).
Its a very inexpensive way to store massive amounts of data and have it directly attached.
We've just started to look at moving to Fibre. They have a Fibre-to-SATA JBOD getting ready to ship, and with the Fibre head unit, we could expand quite a bit. We've got 12T online now, and are growing at a rate of 2.2G per week. With traditional SCSI based SANs, that would be impossibly expensive.
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
With all due respect, you have absolutely no idea of what you are talking about.
You've never had to deal with a seriously damaged filesystem. One in which the journal has been lost. Please read the posting again. You totally missed the point.
ReiserFS in fact is the one which died on me. Sticking everything in lost+found without any intelligence is straight out of the 1970's.
This is an issue which will bite too many system admins. Only too late will they find their journaled filesystem to end up costing them a lot of downtime because of this stupidity of the current filesystem implementors.
Is there enough disk space left to do anything useful after installing WinXP on it?
I dunno if anybody else laughed at that, but I sure did.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Tahya al-moqawama al-Iraqiyah!
10^15 bytes? Each human on Earth has 3 billion (3x10^9) base pairs of DNA. Assuming 2 bits to encode a base pair of DNA, that means a PetaBox(tm) can only store the DNA of 1.3 million people. So you'd need getting on for 5000 of these (assuming no compression) to store the entire population.
... but honestly, that's a lotta pr0n!
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
...for the term "low power" that I certainly never encountered before... :
"Low power-- 6kWatts per rack, and 60kWatts for the whole system"
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
That's a lot of storage in one place - a lot of data to lose - what if there's a fire or flood? How do you back up a petaflop of data?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Where is the Obligatory Beowulf Cluster joke?
I can't believe I'm the 563rd AC post, and got to deliver it first. Maybe they all got modded down to -1.
Since many people have already posted or wanted to post the usual "imagine a beowolf cluster of these", I have to wonder if that might be redundant. Wouldn't one of these BE a beowolf cluster?
If so, then we can all imagine no more!
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Imagine Groucho from the Marx Brothers standing between this thing and a hot woman.
"Why this the the most magnificent rack I've..."
*Looks at girl"
"No this is the most mag...."
*Looks back at the Peta Box*
"No this is the most magnificent rack I've ever seen."
Good thing marketing didn't call the it a PetaFile
Is that you?!
I'm still disappointed that they're not teaching young geeks to count in binary in school anymore. Perhaps we need to start teaching graphics entirely in TI99/4A basic (as that's where I got my first exposure to binary- converting, by hand, 8x8 bitmaps into Hexadecimal for redefining the font).
Nah, teach shape tables for Apple II series computers. Have the students work out how to draw an image using vector plotting moves, convert them into 3-bit binary codes (occasional no-plot moves to 2-bit), put the sequences in a table, convert them to hexadecimal, then back into decimal to be put in a DATA statement to be READ and POKEd into memory.
That will eat up a lot of class time and keep the kids out of mischief for awhile. Especially the debugging of the resulting shape table to find whether they made an error in their vector moves, putting them in the table in the wrong order, used the wrong binary code for a vector direction, a bad binary->hex->decimal conversion, or just a typo in their DATA statements.
Teaching them how to use the *monitor to do the hex-decimal conversion will be later, and even later how to put them into memory directly and BSAVE them to disk to be BLOADed instead of POKEd.
And if there's enough time, maybe then get into raster graphics using & commands to interface with machine code using lookup tables and indirect addressing modes to efficiently locate a location on the 8-field interlaced graphics screen to store bytes. (Whether there is enough time depends on whether or not you started the semester on how to load and save programs to cassette tapes.)
Oh, the memories.... what was this thread about again? Oh, yeah. A pity that ProDOS had a partition size limit of 32 MiB, and that there's also a limit to the number of partitions you can have. That petabyte rack would have a lot of unusable space hooked up to an Apple II (apart from a IIgs which could use HFS). Though maybe... you use a dynamically rewritten partition table so you could address the full capacity in 32 MiB chunks! Though drive 0 in the array would wear out a lot faster than any other.
(Don't sweat the multiple replies, and don't take them personally. Hopefully each one is more generally informative than the last.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It probably takes more than just basepairs to make a Spice Girl (even neglecting the simulation of a Thatcherite childhood). There's also the newly-investigated "methylation" info layer, which modulates the genome's potential codes. And if we're just finding out about methylation, what else lies within?
--
make install -not war
Apu: Could it be used for dating?
Frink: Well, theoretically, yes, but! the computer matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."