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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. "
download the whole internet !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Does that stand for *cough* DeathStar, er *cough* I mean DeskStar hard drives?
More articles, for the more article inclined.
It's 67.2 TB if you have 14 racks (224 disks)...a single rack only allows 300Gb x 16drives = 4.8 TB...quite still a lot though.
The DS6000 supports up to to 67.2TB, but not in one enclosure. The DS6000 only fits 16 disks per enclosure, and with 400GB disks that is 6.4TB. 400GB disks seem to only be available as SATA and PATA, the largest SCSI disks I could find are 300GB. That means 4.8TB per enclosure. 16 DS6000's per 48U rack, that's 76.8TB. Remove every 8th disk for RAID-5, that's 67.2TB.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
"These are the most significant storage announcements we have made in more than a decade. IBM is focused on being the storage innovator and clear technology leader," said Dan Colby, General Manager, IBM Storage Systems. "Today, we are delivering new economics and choice by leveraging common components, breakthrough technologies from mainframes and supercomputers, and unmatched virtualization and management capabilities."
Most significant in a decade? New economics? Wow, this is too important for Slashdot. Somebody should call Time magazine. Or Newsweek.
At that price I'll have one.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
It'll grow by the modular 3U unit.
The single 3U unit won't hold 67.2Tb, that's a bunch of them linked together.
Phewww! finally enough space to keep all my porn in one place!
uh oh... Microsoft Windows Longhorn Minimum System Requirements: ...
Hard Drive: 30TB
Memory: 2 GB
You misread the spec, I believe. There's 16 drive bays, and the biggest single drive I'm aware of at the moment is 400 gig.
What they said was: "Using modular, 3U, 16 disk drive, rack-mountable enclosures, the DS6000 series can grow along with your storage needs up to 67.2TB physical storage".
According to the datasheet, they offer drives up to 300gig in each bay, which works out to around 4.8 Tb per enclosure.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Product pricing and availability
IBM's new storage offerings with enterprise class functions reset the bar with minimum configurations starting at half a terabyte and list prices starting as low as $97,000. The DS6000 series and the DS8000 series come standard with a four-year warranty on hardware and software, which is unique in the industry.
What are they smoking? 9.7 k a terrabyte, maybe. 97k. Even EMC is not that high any more.
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
If only there were some sort of visual stimuli -- say, something which appeals to our most basic primal instincts -- which could be stored on such a device, and subsequently accessed whenever one is bored and no one is watching. Alas, I am unable to imagine anything suitable. Perhaps one of my fellow Slashdotters has an idea?
67.2TB should be enough for anyone!
-- Get
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?
--
make install -not war
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?
Hitachi took over IBM's Desktop hard drive business.
And I believe IBM actually had 2 lines that had issues (The 75 GXP and, to a lesser extent, the 60 GXP).
I had 2 30 GB 75 GXP drives, I think I ended up going through 3 RMAs. Eventually, IBM replaced one with a 60 GB 120GXP (I believe it was the 120 GXP) with an 8mb cache (original drives only had 2mb cache). While the RMAs were a hassle, IBM did a pretty good job of taking care of me.
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.
And how the eckle feckin do we back that baby up?
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
We've been getting disk arrays like the DS6000 for months now... for example:
RocketSTOR R2221
or
Silicon Mechanics SM-316RX
sorry, but the number of people who are into old people porn is much lower than the number who like to look at young cheerleaders...
I dunno man, after listening to William Shatner's new album, I dont feel the need for porn.
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
Good: - Robust technology - Modular - IBM support Bad: - Expensive - Only 2 GB of cache (mirrored) - Slow, check out http://www.storageperformance.org/results
RTFA! It's only 125 pounds! (Sterling, I'm sure.)
Lemon curry???
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.
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.
Use Adsense for Charity
If you actually read the link, you'd see there is at least as much redundancy designed into the system than in most NAS systems, and it has been very reliable to date. You are familiar with the idea of RAID, aren't you -- Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks? This is the same approach as in the IBM hardware, but at a much higher level.
For example they maintain integrity checks of every block, to catch silent corruption. This is not done by many competing systems -- it is a major selling point of Sun ZFS that they do.
The primary reason why Google don't use this for their financial systems is likely that it is custom designed for their search applications, not for whatever financial systems they use. Secondarily the volume is so small that an off-the-shelf system probably works fine.
Do I expect everyone to build their own system? No, but for some users it works well.
(Why are people happy to use the thought "fuck", but not the letters? Bizarre. And what is this loose data you speak of?)
Google is a completely different animal.
Google itself is ultra reliable so long as most everything is working kinda sorta well. Something breaks and Google just researches the web, which it was going to do anyway. Google can function perfectly well with lots of its components broken. Almost nobody else can.
As a Brit, I'm somewhat disappointed that the writeup meant the other "pound".
The ONLY 125 pound storage device that will hold up to 67.2 TB!
I don't really need 67.2TB of storage, but at £125 I would certainly have considered it. £1.86 per TB is not a bad price (US$3.33)
Cheers,
RogerDo you have any better hostages?
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.