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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!"
At last, a chance for a rejected ask slashdot of mine... What is the structure of your file storage area / file server? How do you filter and back things up for your home file server?
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As long as it's not silver, black or grey, I'm fine with adding another petabyte to my current configuration. If only my file system could handle it...
Knowing my luck, I'd probably tip the rack over and lose all the bank data to a massive head crash.
If information is power, then this thing is a perpetual motion machine.
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
A) Because why would you want every reality TV program at your fingertips?
B) Because we already do (See http://bittorrent.com/)
C) Because... just because.
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Not when I keep getting a new internet every few minutes. A whole internet every few minutes! Can you imagine how many libraries of congress that is? I don't know about you, but I'd have a lot of trouble stuffing an entire library of congress into one of those tubes! And since the library of congress is obviously a lot bigger than this storage computer, there's no way you could stuff it into it!
Until they come out with one of these that's bigger than the library of congress, I'm not buying!
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My head spinning with the amazing possibilities such an immense data storage per kW solution could be applied to...why, it was even re-kindling my interest in the mini-ITX board. Then....I read the article
"The next step up is the TB120 PetaBox, basically a rack of 40 GB3000s and an ethernet switch or two."
WOW! so far so good...then, things turn ugly
"If you need more space than that, I would say it is time to lay off the naughty pictures for a bit and seek serious help.
In any case, Capricorn is saying you can get into one to the TB120s for about $1.50 a GB, and a little math says a full rack would cost under $200K. If you think that is a lot, imagine the Tivo you could make out of one, you could have every reality TV program at your fingertips for a little less than the cost of an average house."
Yup, for a mere $200K, you too can have every reality TV program and/or naughty picture at your fingertips...and here I was thinking about mundane things like virtual libraries, genome sequencing, protien folding, etc.
I'm going to be sad now...
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I'm not interested in no mini-itx box unless it's wedged into an adorable, panda-like case. http://www.norhtec.com/products/panda/index.html
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
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.
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And, no, I'm not talking about the starship Enterprise, so can it with the "Star Trek" comments.
Obviously, this is the kind of product that companies and perhaps even data centers will possibly take a very long and desiring look at. No doubt that's exactly what Capricorn is hoping for. 3.2Kw/hr is nothing compared to the power that's eaten up by a rack that's loaded with arrays and SCSI drives.
My concern is with reliability. For the most part, the general attitiude is that SCSI, while much more expensive than IDE or SATA, is also more reliable with a larger MTBF. Whether that's really true or not is up for debate, but that's the general opinion that out there. Of course, there's also the general attitude that more spindles means more throughput and more reliability if in a proper RAID configuration. From what I've seen with other solutions, we can probably assume with a wide margin of safety that 120TB for this Capricorn system is RAID 0. If a 1U system only contains four drives and they're all independent RAID configurations, then say goodbye to 30 TB just to add a modicum of redundancy with RAID 5, whereas if there were more spindles, the amount of lost space would be greatly decreased even though there would be the increased chance of a failed drive.
Looking at this system, my gut feel is that a more-spindle configuration might be a wiser move, unless the money saved in electricity goes to a better-than-average backup system. Maybe it's my bias towards SCSI/fibre channel, but I don't know that I can yet trust a low-spindle, IDE configuration to do the same thing in an enterprise environment.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone out there in Slashdotland had good luck with enterprise IDE solutions? Who knows. Perhaps some success stories might change my pro-SCSI/fibre view.
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Technically this is a convenient way to stuff a lot of managed storage into a small space with low power consumption. Cool, but it's really nothing more than a bunch of servers in a single rack with big hard drives. If I've got a petabyte of storage to utilize I want to manage it as one large pool (or several large pools), not 40 servers, on each of which I need to run an OS and services which make a relatively small portion of that storage available. Where's my FC or iSCSI target ports?
3200 Watts for 120 Terra bytes - that's like two hand-held hair dryers!
Kids these days... we used to have these things called Mainframes. They had special 240v wiring, with BIG power cables. You could hear the circuitbreaker box HUM when you walked past. This is all a pittance.
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You think that's bad? My CPU fan consumes 70+ watts.
c t in series!
What's worse the rig I built to cool my harddrives is essentially a system of Peltier devices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier-Seebeck_effe
The very premise of the grandparent is ridiculous. Now if it were one-point-twenty-one-jigga-watts, I'd be worried, but 80 watts? I've got more on in light bulbs right now!
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.
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Yea, but most people dont run two hair-dryers 24/7
You haven't met my wife.
Yea, but most people dont run two hair-dryers 24/7
You haven't met my wife.
Those aren't hair dryers.
Or 28,000 kWh per year, i.e. $2800 at $0.10 per kWh (not sure what the going rate is nowadays).
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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.
3200 Watts for 120 Terra bytes - that's like two hand-held hair dryers!
Or 28,000 kWh per year, i.e. $2800 at $0.10 per kWh (not sure what the going rate is nowadays).
In other words, if you have the money to afford 120 terabytes of storage, let alone the need to have and use that storage, you can probably afford to pay for the electricity to run it.
And as a bonus, you could lease the exhaust from your 120 terabyte storage system to a nearby hair salon so you can kill two birds with one stone.
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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.)
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