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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."
This is pretty interesting in that it's yet another item that we all wish we had just for overkill purposes.
However, I doubt they'll sell many of these. The only places I can think of that would benefit from this are supercomputing institutes, but they often build their own redudant RAID systems and/or NAS systems.
It's nice and all, but seriously people, who's the audience?
Interesting calculation: If you live 80 years, that's 435.5 KB per second -- enough for a TV-quality video of your entire life.
Be relentless!
If every JPEG was 500 KB, 4,708,523,520 of them. This doesn't account for the operating system, if there is one. Still, when would you ever need to store nearly 5 trillion JPEGs, unless you're Google Caching?
- Nick
http://www.archive.org/web/petabox.php
By those who truly care about the human tradition, and spreading the music of the Grateful Dead and other freely available media.
Is this another slashvertisement?
It's amazing how quickly storage increases and prices go down. On the other hand, it's interesting to keep in mind that as amazing as an iPod nano would be in 1985, the invention of paper was the single biggest leap in storage density we've ever seen.
The thing is built around 2,400 500GB hard drives.
I wonder when (if) the average consumer can get 1PB harddrives?
I don't know if Moores law applies historically to harddrives, but if doubling of capacity occured every 18 months and figuring 500GB is the limit size now and the doubling continues into the future:
500GB - Now
1TB - 18 months
2 - 36
4 - 54
8 - 72
16 - 90
32 - 108
64 - 126
128 - 144
256 - 162
512 - 180
1024TB = 1PB - 198months which is 16.5 years.
If you assume MTBF of 500,000 hours, you get an average of one failure every 500,000 hours / 2400 drives / 24 hours/day = ~8.7 days. Keep in mind that you're probably paying $800-$1600/drive (EMC drives ain't cheap), so it's closer to $100-200/day for maintenance. Now, that may be included in the price, it may be included in a service contract, or it may be paid out-of-pocket.
Close to 50 years ago, you would pay $35,000/year for a 5MB disk drive (the first hard drive ever, IBM's 5MB 305 RAMAC). 20 years ago you were lucky to even be able to pick up a 1GB drive.
dom
Large data centers often have far more than 2400 operational disks. Under these conditions, at any given moment, some fraction of all storage has faulted and repair activity is continuous. This is one reason SCSI hardware is preferred: the disks are more uniform (capacity, electrical interface, etc.,) and replacements remain available over longer intervals.
This isn't the slightest bit unusual. At any moment some fraction of the power transmission and distribution system has faulted. Some percentage of all aircraft are grounded. Various segments of all wide area communications systems are down. Repairs never cease.
$350 equates to a few minutes of aggregate labor costs spent financing, provisioning, securing and monitoring a petabyte of storage. Other large ongoing costs include power and cooling. $350/day is lost in the noise.
EMC's new offering will reduce many of these costs for a given amount of storage. The thing to do then is build data centers to host these machines by the dozen.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
With a beast like this that fills up a whole room, anything else becomes a peripheral....
That's generally what you pay a fortune for when you buy these big beasts.
It all boils down to what is most important for you - the money or the hassle of managing less integrated systems. The big filers are by no means the right choice for everybody, but they are nice to work with if you can justify the cost.
Features in high end storage systems like this typically include things like redundant-everything (multiple controllers with automatic failover, multiple sets of write cache, RAID, multiple power supplies), up to and including systems where you can pull out entire packs of drives while the system is running without noticing more than a reduced IO rate.
Many of them also have extensive built in health checks, and some will "call home" and the first you might know about a potential problem may be the engineer showing up at your office to fix it before it does become a problem (of course, you pay accordingly....)
Other features usually involve snapshot support (get a second virtual "drive" that is "frozen" at a point in time - makes doing backups a breeze because you can quiet database updates etc., make a snapshot, and then go on with your business and not have to deal with complex hot backup solutions), and often remote synchronisation (get a second box at a second location, put up a fibre link between them, and let the boxes handle the rest)
Of course you can do most/all of this with cheaper hardware too, but then you have to build it yourself. If you're, for instance a bank, and are dealing with huge sums of money, it's often far easier to buy stuff like this and pay for the maintenance contracts and just not have to deal with it any more.
For mere mortals they are usually just outrageously overprised compared to the features we actually need.
Though I must say I have always had a weakness for hardware that comes with cases big enough to live in and requires forklifts to move... :)
1 Peta[byte]?? How many JPEGS would that be?
JPEGs are too small for the margin of error in the reporting of this 1 PB array. From the article, it appears to be a 1.2 PB array (2400 * 500 GB), presumably to push it over the 1 PiB capacity(*). And that's assuming the whole capacity is available and none of it used for redundancy. (That's a lot of data to lose over one drive failure.)
(*) The difference between 1 PB and 1 PiB is nearly 126 TB! That's a lot of space to miss over not knowing what units you're talking about. Byte @
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?