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Petabyte Storage Array
knight13 writes "Engadet is reporting that EMC is rolling out a petabyte RAID array. From the article, "And if you're ready for that level of storage, there's now someplace to get it: EMC has launched its first petabyte array, a version of the company's flagship Symmetrix DMX-3 system that includes nine room-filling cabinets of drives." The price? A mere $4 million."
I was just thinking about how 4 years ago you could build a terabyte array for about $5-10,000 down from many millions 8 years ago. Today, you can get a terabyte for less than $500. In a few years, a petabyte is only going to cost $5,000. If you just buying space for future growth, it seems like a total waste of money.
Let's assume for a moment that the average lifetime of one hard disk in this petabyte array is 6.5 years. Since there are 2,400 hard drives, that means that once this thing has been running for a while, you will be replacing, on average, one broken hard drive per day, for the entire lifetime of the array. That's about $350 per day in replacement parts alone!
If the man has 50 Terabytes of critical data that he needs to backup and ship every day, I'd say he probably has a budget that could accomidate one of these things. While multi-terabyte arrays are more common than they once were, anyone carrying around that much data still needs to spend millions just to keep their infrastructure intact.
:-P
Now all he's got to do is get his boss to sign the check.
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Actually this solution is pretty cheap. If you look at a system with a 3ware card (12 port) you can get the cost per TB to about $1700. That way you would need 500 of them. (Each system has 12 400G drives. RAID 5 loose 2 per system to stay under 2TB.) Cost would be roughly $1.7M. This does not include networking or racks, etc.
Thus 2x that cost is pretty good and you get a better package.
I agree, there would be a lot of people who would still build there own, but this is getting very close.
Oh industries who would like this. Medical (these guys create 10x the data that nuclear physics creates), oil and gas, rendering (data duplication to reduce hot spots), disk backups (as mentioned before), call centers with large db (almost anyone now days), financial industry. Really with a solution like this, you can also branch out with other filesystem and access patterns to your computers (lustre and gpfs).
I pity you.