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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. "
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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?
At that price I'll have one.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
uh oh... Microsoft Windows Longhorn Minimum System Requirements: ...
Hard Drive: 30TB
Memory: 2 GB
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?
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.
RTFA! It's only 125 pounds! (Sterling, I'm sure.)
Lemon curry???