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IBM Launches New Product Line
An anonymous reader notes that "IBM has launched its new product line of storage devices: the DS6000 and the DS8000. The results are quite impressive, with the DS6000 being rack mountable, 3U, and ONLY 125 pound storage device that will hold up to 67.2 TB! The DS8000 is equally impressive, with 6x performance of ESS 800 (Shark), making it the most powerful storage system to date. "
I dunno. 67Tb in thirteen 3U 16 drive units doesn't sound all that impressive. Maybe if you could fit 100Tb in 50U of space I would be impressed. If this could even scale that high you could only fit 80Tb in that amount of space. 3U for 4.8Tb of raw storage is not a big deal. You can build your own low quality system with that kind of capacity yourself out of cheap disks. Obviously not with the same performance though.
Although I will admit that this is a very fast product with decent redundancy. Although I generally believe dealing with redundancy at a higher level with software is much more flexible than controller level redundancy. And cheaper.
Fibrechannel drives sound neat and all, but if someone can fit 3x as many "lower end" drives in the same amount of space that's lower cost, higher redundancy, higher capacity and higher performance. I'm sure they are good for something though, else IBM wouldn't have such a sales drive behind them. *snicker*
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
To reach solid decision's, youl'l need more infermation then the slashdot writeup supplies. Like this article featured on linuxtoday.com, which are surely slightly more independent than IBMs' press release's; (click complete story under the summary) From it:
... "You can run different operating systems, even different releases of operating systems on isolated LPAR's. Rock!"
The DS8000 is unique in the industry because it features two logical partitions too run management or utility applications such as the companies SAN Volume Controller and Tivoli Storage Manager for backup and data management.
That sounds like a pretty interesting feature. Anybody's in the industry care to comment on the portential for these new development?
This article on lightreading.com elaborates a little more.
IBM's DS8000 handles virtualization different then the competition. While HDS does virtualization in the controller and EMC plans virtualization on intelligent switches IBMs' new system does virtualization at the chip level (see EMC on Virtualization: Wait for Us ). Using the Power5's IBM Virtual Engine, the DS800 can divide servers into logical partitions (LPARs). Each LPAR can run different storage systems that run separate code.
Thats a truly impressive level of flexibility their. And of course, its great for Linux, the ability to run multiple OSe's in hardware on one box play's to Linuxes strength's and deal's a blow to Microsoft's monopoly lockin strategy. What Im really shocked about is that there slashdot writeup included only some bland "durr big numbers" product placement, while IBM is effecting an interesting Linux-related change's in the marketplace's if you look a little deeper.
--sig: why a duck?
yes, especially because, "No one gets fired for choosing IBM" while if you build your own RAID, you might get.
I've also had experience with FC setups which have a limit on the number of RAID sets you can have hooked off a single controller -- typically around 16. Now, if you don't have a lot of disk drives, that's not a problem, but if you want good redundancy, and you have (say) 200 hard drives in the set, it is: you don't want to have the whole damn thing in one massive RAID 5 array and suffer a huge performance hit when one of the disks dies (let alone what happens if two disks die at nearly the same time -- don't laugh, it happens more often than manufacturers would like to admit.)
Yes, performance and capacity are important. But so too are things like this that you don't think about asking about until you bump into the limitations. Most people will happily roll out huge chunks of disks for their databases and so forth, in which case this isn't likely to be an issue. But -- depending upon the circumstances -- you need to know what can bite you down the track so you can plan for it.
Don't get me wrong -- there are several ideas in this stuff that look extremely interesting (not least of which is the prospect of being able to do backups without involving the servers using the disks at all) -- but you do need to lift the carpet and see what's been swept underneath before you buy.
When I hear someone suggest to roll your own anything, I want to scream and run as they probably haven't worked a day in a real production environment. I'd like to see you roll your own, manage, and support a multiterabyte storage system and then decide by yourself whether it was worth it or not (assuming you're lucky and get a chance to do so, after not being fired because something has gone wrong and ate your data or caused downtime)
As for this particular case, this system was obviously designed to efficiently manage vast amounts of storage. It is not worth buying if you only need a 580GB of storage. Besides, no one pays the list price in the enterprise storage market. No one also buys IBM's enterprise hardware just because they think they need the hardware alone.
No matter how much google stores, it is not the one to look at when you're talking corporate data storage. Corporate datastorage is about storing all the data of all your oil fields, in a way you're sure you don't loose it. It is about storing every single product that you make in a database, complete with tracking of location and which customer bought it. It is about all those things Google doesn't do and doesn't care about. I am willing to bet that for its financial system Google is using similar to the one shown here. Why? because it is reliable.
Google is using of the shelf hardware, because it doesn't matter to them if they loose data because of disk failure. As long as it doesn't happen too often and from the perspective of the customer doesn't matter, it is not a problem.
Now think of google having to have an accurate and 100% corrrect archive of the internet, which has to be searched and correlated 7 years back and then see what they would come up with.
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Ha ha, funny troll.
You seem to be confusing the market that this thing is targetted as. This is Storage Area Networking, normally applied to systems for who's downtime cost far more to the company than this disk.
First, it's fast disk. Fibre Channel drives, using 15 000 rpm (up to 146GB now?), or 10 000rpm (300GB) disks.
Second, it's expandable. Just add extra drive chassies on the expansion loops.
Third, and the reason people buy these, is that it makes managing storage for 10s to 1000s (DS8000) of machines simpler. Only allocate the amount you need, but grow it easily without the hassle of dealing with normally under utilized scsi system disks.
This equipment is for "big time", highly reliable, yet highly redundant computing. That costs money. Your suggestion is for cheap cheap disk - and you should be looking at someone like www.infortrend.com if you had a $5k budget and wanted SATA-to-SCSI. The dual AMD and 4GB ram is a waste in your config.