Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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
...drumroll
Peta-files
if you still enjoy wearing furs??
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Maybe someone should try to sell these boxes to GMail? They will surely need a lot of storage space.
How many LOCs/VW Bug?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
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?
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
Can we say, Goooooooooooooooogle?
If you have to ask, you can't afford it. Just remember that. It might come in handy again someday. :)
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
Wrong
One PetaByte is 1,000 TeraBytes which are 1,000,000 GigaBytes wich are 1,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes wich are 3.35 LotsOfPr0n.
Think someone like the government is going to keep track of who buys these things?
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.
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.
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 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
After extensive market research, it has been determined that a "buttload" is roughly 3.5 gigabytes.
In case you were wondering.
It's my favorite unit of measure.
Coincidentally, I have a buttload of porn.
Depends on whether you're talking Pb or PBi.. If i recall with the big HD size debate several months ago, the Gb/Mb are multiples of 1000 whereas GBi/MBi are multiples of 1024.. maybe i have the abbreviations wrong.. but there are separate units for 1024 multiples due to some whacky issue with SI units or something.. does anybody remember the link to that thread?
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!
As always, wikipedia has the answer(s):
Damn! Ambiguity!
This is where the serious fun begins.
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
In the "discussion" blocks down below there's a price link.
Rack materials cost is currently estimated to be $121K for 96TB. Node materials are a just under $1450. This price does not include markup, assembly or burn-in from the system integrator and thus will increase by another 5-7% to approximately $130K/rack.
The weight of a fully-loaded rack is estimated to be 1500 lbs. That figure may rise depending on what hardware is required for rack cooling.
Power is estimated to be 5500 watts. This too will depend on rack level cooling equipment.
These figures assume no external 1G Ethernet NICs.
For a breakdown of all the above, see the attached spreadsheet.
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.
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.
"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
I think your confusing square footage with cupic footage, if the average house had ten foot high ceilings, it would only take up 16 feet of floor space
Duke Nukem Forever is "ready"!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I think you're confused. A normal 2 bedroom house (that doesn't have wheels) will have a floor space around 1600-1700 square feet. With 8 foot ceilings, the interior (3D) space would be about 12,000 cubic feet at least.
Do you want to remove linux?
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)
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
monkeys eventually write both vi and emacs while working on shakespeare
...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.
Everyone I know says giga with a hard G. The only exception I know of is Christopher Lloyd's character in Back To The Future.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Good, now I don't need to delete my spam.
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
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.
From the forum:
Rack materials cost is currently estimated to be $121K for 96TB. Node materials are a just under $1450. This price does not include markup, assembly or burn-in from the system integrator and thus will increase by another 5-7% to approximately $130K/rack.
So, about $1.3M (10 racks)
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
So, about $1.3M (10 racks)
What would be interesting is to know the estimated maintenance costs as well. With than many drives, I imagine you'd be changing them like light bulbs, especially as time passes and the probability of each drive failing get's higher and higher.
If one was really clever, they could use the failure rate of a typical hard disk and Moore's Law to estimate monthly replacement costs for the next 100 years or so. I would expect them to rise in the short term as the drives age, but fall in the long term as moore's law catches up.
Life is too short to proofread.
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.
Does that make you a petaphile?
[massive karma burn detected]
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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.
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).
Is there enough disk space left to do anything useful after installing WinXP on it?
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).
Actually the SI defines the prefixes irrelevant of units used. Think of the mil ('milli-inch'); how many do you think there are in the inch? If I had a thousand cats I could refer to the set as one kilocat, and hence if I had 1024 cats I could refer to it as a kibicat, Tweety-pie style; note that a cat is not an SI metrological term. Try playing around with the units(1) command sometime; to get a feel for these SI prefixes.
The last thing you want with a setup like this is having to haul hardware around or disconnect stuff if you for any reason can't boot of the disks anymore. And you certainly don't want to reduce density by wasting space that could be filled with disks with other stuff.