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. "

Comments

Expensive logo?

[Doc Ruby]

Actually, the DS8000 is marketed as expandable up to 192TB. Since it's marketed as starting at 580GB, and priced starting at $97K, that's about $167:GB. Considering that a single 160GB drive, without redundancy, integrated POWER uC and other server hardware, IBM support or management software costs about $0.50:GB, and probably less in quantities of 1200 (==192TB), are those extras worth it compared to rolling your own RAID?

Re:Expensive logo?

[Doc Ruby]

OTOH, the DS6000 takes 300GB SCSI drives. 192TB is 640 300GB drives, which cost at least $197 in EIDE, for a total of $126K. While SCSI drives cost well over $500ea at 300GB, though about $1:GB at 147GB. If a loaded DS6000 costs anywhere near $325K, IBM really has great prices at the high end. That's about 768K FLAC'ed CDs, which would cost $15.4M to buy at $20ea.

Re:Writeup is wrong

[OrangeTide]

8 disk RAID-5? You have a lot more guts than I do!

Maybe raid5+1 or maybe four 4-disk raid5s stuck together in an append or raid0. Or maybe raid6, if anyone ever releases a product that makes it easier to manage.

Backup 4TB?

[soundman32]

And how the eckle feckin do we back that baby up?

Re:Backup 4TB?

[rhaig]

backing up 4TB is almost trivial, I handle almost 5 now. The more interesting case would be the full 67.2 TB

ok, so if you want 12 weeks of retention, and do nightly incrementals and weekly fulls, 67.2 TB would require about 952TB of tape capacity.

(figure 3% daily change * 6 incrementals/week + 1 full/week * 12 weeks, so 14.16*disk=tape)

so if we round up to 1PB of tape, and let's assume LTO2, with 320GB/tape (about the numbers I'm seeing for binary data), that's roughly 3200 tape slots + 260/week for offsite copies. Call it 3500 slots.

Since I know the storagetek line of tape backup products, I'll talk about them...

you could start with 3 L1400 libraries with 10 drives each, and it would take you less than 24hrs/week to back up all that. And duplicating the tapes for the offsites another 24-48.

the libraries and drives would cost you near $500000, the tapes (assuming an 8 week offsite rotation, and buying an extra 10% for the partially used tapes that will always be present) would cost you about $340000.

now I know Veritas netbackup is ungodly expensive, but I have the prices for it in my head, so I'll quote that too...

for 30 drives handling this much data, I'd probably put in 6 servers. ($10K each) Veritas licenses drives ($3k each) for a software total of $150K.

Throw in some fibre switches to mesh it all together, the cost for the servers, (IBM 345s with 2 fibre cards and a couple of 146G scsi drives each: about $50K) and the total ends up being about a million bucks. ($1.04M)

Go with something like Tivoli Storage Manager and that 150K software cost drops to more like $15K (they don't license on a per drive basis)

want to build an enterprise level backup solution... there you go.

after reading the spec sheet

[halaloszto]

The 3U box can only hold 16pcs of 300G disks max, that is about 5T. The 67T can only be achieved with additional boxes of course. v

Re:My question...

[boots@work]

It probably has Linux inside, seeing as it just has PowerPC processors. Linux would be the obvious platform for the "host" part of the system, running the web/telnet interface or whatever. The hard work is probably done by some non-Linux embedded code on separate processors.

My advice is to wait five or ten years and get one at a fire sale, then pull it apart.