IBM Building 120PB Cluster Out of 200,000 Hard Disks

MrSeb writes "Smashing all known records by some margin, IBM Research Almaden, California, has developed hardware and software technologies that will allow it to strap together 200,000 hard drives to create a single storage cluster of 120 petabytes — 120 million gigabytes. The data repository, which currently has no name, is being developed for an unnamed customer, but with a capacity of 120PB, it's most likely use will be a storage device for a governmental (or Facebook) supercomputer. With IBM's GPFS (General Parallel File System), over 30,000 files can be created per second — and with massive parallelism, and no doubt thanks to the 200,000 individual drives in the array, single files can be read or written at several terabytes per second."

Comments

Proof of corporate favoritism by government

[OzPeter]

The government happily stands by when a major corporation announces that it has 120 petabytes (ie petafiles - my emphasis) under its control, yet if the average joe schmo even thinks about how they'd like a petafile or two at home the FBI, CIA, TSA, ICE (and every other TLA) hauls his ass off to jail and and etches a scarlet letter on his forehead.

Such harassment by the government of simple people who aren't hurting anyone else needs to be stopped. Think of the children -- how are they going to cope when their own father/uncle/priest gets charged with accessing petafiles? They'll be the laughing stick of their peers!