PetaBox: Big Storage in Small Boxes

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is reporting that a Linux-based system comprising more than a petabyte of storage as been delivered to the Internet Archive, the non-profit organization that creates periodic snapshots of the Internet. The PetaBox products, made by Capricorn Technologies, are based on Via mini-ITX motherboards running Debian or Fedora Linux. The IA's PetaBox installation consists of about 16 racks housing 600 systems with 2,500 spinning drives, for a total capacity of roughly 1.5 petabytes, according to the article. Now to strap one of those puppies to my iPod!" The Internet Archive continues to astound.

Comments

Good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

For all the jokes out there about people 'downloading the internet' it's good to know someone is actually doing it.

Re:Good to see.

[FireballX301]

Who the heck cares about the rest of the internet, can this thing hold all the pr0n?

Re:Good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it run Lin... um.

How about a Beo.. oh damn

Re:Good to see.

[Council]

In one of the weirder perspective exercises I've ever conceived:

5 petabytes of storage is enough for a brief five-minute DVD-quality sex scene for each person of legal age in the US (two to a scene). 100 petabytes would be five minutes of porn of every pair of people in the world.

I actually wonder about this a little; how many women have posed nude on the internet? There seem to be an awful lot; I haven't been able to see them all (though I will continue to try). Where do they mostly come from, I wonder.

Re:Good to see.

[Mark Hood]

There seem to be an awful lot; I haven't been able to see them all (though I will continue to try). Where do they mostly come from, I wonder.

Let me get this straight, you're trying to see all the porn in the world, and you still don't know where babies come from? :)

You hear about the Petabox?

[Dancin_Santa]

Michael Jackson was heard breathing a sigh of relief. He thought it was where they sent Petafiles.

R. Kelly was scrambling to find the company's phone number.

Re:You hear about the Petabox?

[pyrrhonist]

Michael Jackson was heard breathing a sigh of relief. He thought it was where they sent Petafiles.

Hmmm, this seems almost familiar...

Let's analyze this situation:

• The time on our posts is exactly the same.
• There's a difference of only 3 in the post id values.
• I was unable to foresee the R. Kelly connection.

This can only mean one thing... You are the Kwisatz Haderach!

GET OUT OF MY MIND!!!

archive.org

[Nasarius]

Internet Archive, the non-profit organization that creates periodic snapshots of the Internet.

They do a lot more than that! I've just been downloading some Warren Zevon shows from their Live Music Archive.

copyright

[DualG5GUNZ]

Not to sound like an advocate or anything... But how is it that the Internet Archives project resists claims of copyright infringement and the likes when they have copies of entire websites in their records?

Re:copyright

[seifried]

You can exclude them from your website using the robots.txt:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

For example if you go to archive.org and plug my site into the wayback machine:

We're sorry, access to http://www.seifried.org/ has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt.

and you can also request them to expunge your site from the archive.

They go out of their way to make it easy to prevent your site being copied (more so then most search engines).

Petabox?

[eclectro]

Isn't that what naked girls climb out of to protest fur coats?

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

great usage.

[Bananatree3]

Seriously, I think archive.org deservese sutch a storage system. I have very often wanted to go back to view an archive of a website a while ago, but the cache on Google was from yesterday. It also gives multiple archives of the website based on day which can be quite handy, especially for news related sites. I think they quite well deserve it.

Re:Downloading Kazaa

[HyperChicken]

Not "periodic", continuous. Own a website? Check your logs for the user-agent "ia_archive".

'small box'

[MonoSynth]

So the inventor of the microprocessor dies and suddenly the definition of 'small box' for computer components is again reduced too 'fits in a big room'....

Puppies

[Sinner]

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is ... according to the article. Now to strap one of those puppies to my iPod!"

I'm sorry, baby dogs? That's so last week. I've got an arctic seal pup strapped to my iPod. You should see the looks I get on the subway. Bling, baby, Bling.

maybe i'll be quoted in 15 years..

[qda]

"nobody needs more than a perabyte of storage"

Electricity $$$ ?

[kasnol]

Wow - have they calculate how much is the running cost per day ? I might just stay with my iPod instead for the time being~
Haha~

1.5 Petabytes?

[TheFlyingGoat]

Where can you purchase 600GB drives these days? (1.5PB / 2500 drives)

The math doesn't work when you multiply the number of systems out either: 600 systems * 1.6TB/system = 960TB. That's just under a petabyte, or am I missing something?

Also, if you've got those in a RAID5 setup, you're 'only' talking about approx 800TB of usable space. That's far less than the 1.5 petabytes claimed.

800TB is a lot of space, but there must be a cheaper/easier way than purchasing 600 systems to do it.

Slashdotted ....

[theoddbot]

Mirrordot to the rescue :)

http://mirrordot.org/stories/83ede29a5f303f8c47d1d 70a9ef91f0d/index.html

A Great Historical Tool

[simrook]

The Internet represents a great historical tool. Case and point is what happened on 9/11. Being able to go back and see the progression, paranoia, patrotism, and early iraq/afgahanistan/binladen/hussien posts and opinions on various new sites is amazing. cnn, fox, the ny times, all are archived several times on 9/11 on archive.org.

I for one think that archive.org should turn into some UN effort, with a mission to chronical and store daily/timely snapshots of the internet and the culture at the time, preserving it for future generations. What a tool for future historians!

The ability to look at a large representation of socity at one single critical moment in time, and being able to have first hand sources for all that information is something that can truely change the way history is recorded (and not in the bad newspeak ingsoc way either). Infact, a wholeistic archive of what happens day-to-day, in an easily accessible format, might well help written history to be more representative of actual history (instead of, say the history Bush wants us to believe; that the Iraq war was for human right and not wmd's). I love Foucault.

The internet archive rocks... really hope this project continues full blast.

- Peace

The MPAA and RIAA

[PrivateDonut]

are going to make a killing of the IA when they have finished, it isn't like they haven't made enough money off others as it is, so they may let this one slide in the name of conserving data. On that note, is the IA downloading EVERYTHING or selectively downloading to prevent such issues as copyright infringment?

Wayback and Slashdot

[mcrbids]

Go ahead. Try Slashdot in the wayback machine.

Slashdot has looked virtually identical since 1998!

Re:Wayback and Slashdot

[hawk]

Oh, c'mon. It's not that bad.

Why, just last year they introduced an entirely new story into the rotation of duplicates . . .

:)

hawk

Re:No redundancy? WTF?

[Depili]

Acording to the archive.org (http://www.archive.org/web/petabox.php) they indeed have some redundancy, but not raid. They are operating each system as a separete node, and mirroring nodes. The above link also sheds light on other questions regarding TFA

They don't like RAID

[billstewart]

I was a bit puzzled by that also - the article said the things come in racks of 40 or 64TB, and 16 racks times 64TB is about 1PB, not 1.5.

Also, the article says they don't like RAID, due to bad experiences with RAID5, and the system is configured as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). It doesn't say why, or what users should do to get equivalent protection. My guess is that depending on RAID within a box means you're still vulnerable if the box's CPU or disk controller decides to scribble the disks, or the power supply decides to catch fire or short out and deliver 240VAC on the +5V line or whatever. So if you want a RAID-like set of redundancy, set up your applications or file system mounting or something to calculate the protection disk in software and hand it off to another 1U box for storage.

The overhead of the motherboards here is not that high - they're about $150-200, and support 4 disks that probably cost $200-300 each, so they're only about 20% of the cost, which is not bad. The article didn't say they're using SATA, and it sounded like it's some IDE variant instead, but if you're only using 100 Mbps Ethernet to connect to the box and not the optional GigE, it's not the bottleneck anyway. If you wanted an alternative design, you could probably do something with a couple of 4-way SATA controllers per CPU, with a lot of disks stacked vertically in a 3-4U box looking like an X-serve or something. But that wouldn't necessarily have much of an advantage.

Re:No RAID?!

[iamplasma]

Yeah, but the thing is that the storage is spread out between lots of different 1U units, each with either 1 or 1.6Tb. So to make a RAID5 over 1.6Tb in size, you'd have to cross over multiple machines, adding a serious overhead, especially when you have to calculate parity for the parity drive. On the other hand, if you only did RAID 5 in the individual units, it'd be pretty pointless, because with that many units you'd be crazy to rely on no entire machine failures.

So, while yes, if it really was just one giant supercomputer with a bajillion hard drives in it, RAID 50 would be an ideal solution (as long as the stripes were large enough to prevent too many accesses crossing too many drives, the one big advantage of JBOD here), but that's not what's really in use here.

Two points

[Salamander]

First off, this isn't quite an example of a company suddenly deciding to donate stuff to the Archive. As can be seen on their own website, Capricorn was spun off from the Archive on July 1, 2004. To a large extent, Capricorn exists for the specific purpose of providing storage to the Archive, and if that same storage can be sold to others so much the better.

Second, what about interconnects and performance? The product descriptions say nothing about SCSI or FC or other storage-oriented connectivity, so one must assume that the connection to these boxes is through a network. That would mean each node is an NFS server (or similar), serving up 1.6TB using a 1GHz C3 processor, a maximum of 1GB of memory (for caching etc.) and what appears to be a single GigE link. Can you say unbalanced? The Internet Archive might be the only system with an access pattern so sparse that the ratio between capacity and performance wouldn't be crippling. Don't try using one of these with any other kind of application if performance is a concern...and BTW they don't seem to say anything about high availability or other storage functionality (e.g. integrated backup or snapshots) either. Capricorn's big play seems to be power consumption, but there are other players that can beat them on density (e.g. Copan with 224TB per rack) and multitudes who can offer better performance/functionality. I hate to sound negative, but this is a product so specialized as to be uninteresting.

Disclaimer: I think I met some of the Copan guys once and they seemed cool enough, but there's no other relationship between me and them. That just happened to be the first name I thought of in this space.

Once upon a time

[QMO]

I was driving to work. It wasn't a long drive, but more than 5 minutes.

"Macarena" was on the radio when I started the car. A few minutes later "Macarana" was still on, and I was thinking that the song must be longer than I thought, or something. About then the DJ came on and said "We're playing 'Macarena' until you vomit." Then played the song again.

After that iteration of the song the DJ came back and played some phone calls of people begging him to change the song, but he just said that it was "Macarena" until you vomit.

I don't know when the thing started, but by the time I got to work it was the 17th or so "Macarena" in a row.