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."

Comments

Holy Truman, Batman!

[MarkRose]

Interesting calculation: If you live 80 years, that's 435.5 KB per second -- enough for a TV-quality video of your entire life.

Re:1 Peta?? How many

[rnpg1014]

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?

Re:Kinda Interesting

[TinyManCan]

You're mistaken.

If this was slightly less high-end disk (DMX's are EMC's top of the line) it would be perfect for disk-to-disk backups. We send approx 50 TB a day of data to tape to send offsite. I would *love* to have the last 50 days data on disk, onsite for instant restores.

When will a petabyte hard drive arrive here?

[rolfwind]

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.

Re:Failure rate

[TopSpin]

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.