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3 Terabytes, 80 Watts
legoburner writes "The Enquirer is reporting that Capricorn have released a mini-itx based 1U-sized storage computer featuring four 750-GB hard drives and a 1-Ghz controller system with a typical power usage of an astounding 80 W per machine. A full 40U rack only uses 3.2 kW, which is less than 30 kW for an entire Petabyte!"
3200 Watts for 120 Terra bytes - that's like two hand-held hair dryers!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
backuppc rocks!
Well, seriously, that is a really _low_ figure. We're running to 8-12kW per rack these days on our linux clusters, whether storage node or worker node racks. And we're extra careful to keep our per-rack wattage low.
Since it's not mentioned on their webpage or in the article, I searched for a listing of the price points and found the following.
h tml
"The PetaBox nodes and racks are available now. Base pricing for the nodes (512K RAM, 10/100 interface, and no LCD) ranges from $1,595 (GB1000) to $3,395 (GB3000)." http://products.datamation.com/dms/sc/1156440622.
The GB1000 is the 1TB node and the GB3000 is the 3TB node. I think they might mean 512MB of RAM base, but who knows. Sounds like it's a Fedora linux based product which makes me wonder what services it provides, they don't list. I would assume basic NFS/SMB/AFS services but there's no mention of backup / replication services, mirroring between twin nodes, etc that competitive products offer.
Low-end EMC SAN boxes use SATA: http://www.emc.com/products/platforms.jsp
I dont think it's RAID anything at all.
The PetaBox TB120 says 120TB of space on 40 nodes. That's 3TB a node, and given 4 drives per node, that's 750GB drives.
So basically the RAID selection is left up as an exercise to the reader, they're just marketing raw diskspace with a very low power consumption.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
mine is as follows:
1st Raid 5 array: 3 * 300GB HDDs, stores anime, cartoons, documentaries, misc tv and movies
2nd Raid 5 array: 3 * 300GB HDDs, stores music, code, photos, backups from desktop systems, CD images, music videos, roms and software
All data which has been produced by me personally is backed up to a (raid 5) computer at my parent's house every night with rsync over ssh. Files are shared with windows via samba using 2 shares - read only (for normal usage) and writeable (for copying things onto the server). I found that windows would end up with too many new folders created, or folders moved via drag and drop so put in read only access for most occasions to prevent this and it works well.
Indeed it does, but not on a system like that. BackupPC relies heavily on MD5-checksums and does on the fly (de-)compression of archived files, so a little more horsepower is necessary for smooth operation.
But other than that, there's nothing like BackupPC for a pain- and effortless networkbased backup system.
I'll hope you mean in parallel on your drives. Peltier in series are not befitting that application unless you live in an unusually hot house, or have drives requiring cryo conditions.
Placing peltier patties in series decreases the amount of heat they can move, but obviously increases the temperature differential, but only if the stack is properly designed. It is very easy to put two peltier in series and have worse performance than a single device. In your case, with a non-static system (i.e. the hard drives are actively PRODUCING heat that you wish to remove) heat handling seems more imprtant than massive temperature differential. In thermodynamics, there is no free lunch... your secondary peltier is not only moving the heat away from the drive, but has to struggle with the heat it produces (however much electrical power it consumes is heat) as well as the first stage cooler.
To optimize a multistage thermoelectric cooler, a rule of thumb is that each stage should recieve 1/2 to 1/3 as much current as the previous one. This roughly translates to an equivalent voltage ratio, though as the temperature and temperature delta change, the silicon has different resistances, and the Seebeck also changes the apparent resistance.
In a PC, if you really want to do multistage peltier patties, and assuming they are 12v devices, you would notice an increase in performance (i.e. less heat coming off the hot side, and a colder cold side) if you were to connect the hard drive peltier to the +5V rail, and the heat sink peltier to the +12 rail. This is a very crude system, but definitely better than running both on +12.
I still maintain that the coolers in parallel are preferable for nearly any computer usage. You have a metric library of congress of BTUs (slashdot measurement) to move quickly. Stacked units do this poorly.
I have some data at home to determine near-optimal steady-state stacked configurations. Google is a help too, though sorting through the deep research and crackpot FAQs is rather tedious in this realm.
Thats right bitch, I went to high school. (its easiest to remember it because its kind of like "closure" and they are really calling for deliberation to come to a close and are just bad spellers)
Bottles.
You misspelled "synchronized". RAID != backup. What happens when you accidentally garble "Doctoral Thesis.odt" and automatically overwrite your only other copy with the new version?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Rebuild rate for a RAID1, 2-drive, 750GB SATA set is around 75MB/s. (Raw read/write rates for 750GB drives are around 75MB/s as well.) So figure 3 hours to rebuild a RAID1 array.
Not sure what rebuild rates would be on a RAID5, probably about half of that? So 6 hours to rebuild the array?
(That's using 750GB SATA drives with Software RAID on a PCIe motherboard.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
No it's not even close to enterprise ready! A basic dual-powersupply server with a hardware raid card and a raid5 of sata drives isn't really enterprise ready. Enterprise means no single point of failure. Redundant raid controllers, power supplies, storage networks, mirrored caches, remote administration and performance monitoring, remote snapshots or archiving. Enterprise is expensive, but for good reason.
As for your question, enterprise IDE can only be realistically used for back-up or archiving purposes where the drives are used intermittenly. Several drive makers have sata disks with fibre channel interfaces on them, termed FATA drives. IF you put a bunch of FATA drives under high load 24-hours a day, after about a week you'll start to see 1% of the drives fail EVERY DAY. I'm not joking. I had to deal with a cluster of FATA raids used for high-def video workloads, which was loosing 4-5 drives every day, out of 550 installed. We eventually junked the entire setup and installed 1300 real FC drives instead. Even those die at more than 1 per week. IDE drives work fine in your desktop because you are only loading them up 10 minutes at a time, a couple dozen times a day.
It doesn't look like Capricorn is possitioning this as an enterprise solution anyway. It looks like a workgroup NAS sort of thing, or a proxy cache of some sort. I'd file it in the "not mission-critical" folder.
Capricorn's unit (750GB drives): 3TB per 1U
Sun Fire X4500 (500GB drives): 24TB per 4U
Capricorn TB per 42u rack: 126TB
Sun Fire X4500 TB per 42u rack: 240TB
Capricorn watts per rack (80w/unit): 3360w
Sun Fire X4500 watts per rack (1500w/unit): 15000w
Capricorn watts per PB: 26667W
Sun Fire X4500 watts per PB: 62500W
Capricorn cost per rack: ~ $200,000
Sun Fire X4500 cost per rack: $470,995
Capricorn cost per PB: ~ $ 1,560,000
Sun Fire X4500 cost per PB: ~ $1,960,000
So yes, Capricorn's solution provides lower power usage, but also lower density (And less processing power and redundancy I'd imagine). So it's a tradeoff. Lower the power bills, but raise the rent bill and the risk.
It should be noted that for Sun's server, I'm using the 1500W rating of each of the redundant power supplies, the typical usage would actually be much less (just like how a PC with a 500w PSU might only use 300W under load). This also ignores processor power, as each Sun unit is a quad opteron. It also ignores RAID, as the Capricorn could do no more than 3 drive RAID5, while each Sun box could have a 48 drive RAIDZ or RAIDZ2, wasting a lot less for parity. And things might change if Sun put 750GB drives in their unit instead of 500GB drives. It's all about tradeoffs.
"I have an old 386 running fedora and samba on a 120GB drive with no RAID whatsoever. The machine won't fit another drive and an upgrade will involve so much hassle I've been putting it off over and over. Any reasonable upgrade would have to involve a terabyte machine because I don't want to go through the hassle of upgrading too soon after."
Yea, well, 1986 called, they want their CPU back.
Your system isn't a 386, though; old PATA IDE controllers on those things couldn't address more than 4 or 8gb (the first lip; then there were controller issues at 20, 32 or 36, and 160gb as well). Given that a real 386 won't have the PCI slot for a modern IDE controller, I call bullshit. Just spend the 400$ to get a basic system with a decent IO subsystem, spend 400$ to get the 4gb of RAM to buffer it, and then spend the 800$ to put 1Tb of disk space in (RAID5). That's a fileserver.
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