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Intel Unveils One-Petabyte Storage Servers For Data Centers (theinquirer.net)
Slashdot reader #9,219 Guy Smiley shared this report on a new breed of high-density flash storage. The Inquirer reports:
Intel has unveiled a brand new form factor for solid state disc drives (SSDs)... Intel Optane's new "ruler" format will allow up to a petabyte of storage on a single 1U server rack... By using 3D-NAND, the ruler crams in even more data and will provide more stability with less chance of catastrophic failure with data loss. The company has promised that the Ruler will have more bandwidth, input/output operations per second and lower latency than SAS... As part of the announcement, Intel also announced a range of "hard drive replacement" SSDs -- the S4500 and S4600 0 which are said to have the highest density 32-layer 3D NAND on the market, and are specifically aimed at data centres that want to move to solid state simply and if necessary, in stages.
At 50 cents per gig, the flash is worth about $500,000 for this PB. Spinning platters are under 5 cents per gig. $50,000 for this PB.
For most datacenter storage purposes, the spinning platters are not a bottleneck. The new product is cool and will be very useful in a few specific applications, but it is not going to change much for datacenters. The flash SSD will also save power as well as space, but not enough to justify 10x the upfront cost. Maybe next generation.
AC here due to NDA, I am long time Data Center fellow (15+ years,) I do hardware engineering for the Data Center space for a big company you all hate and love. One of my biggest projects was designing a cabinet that had the highest storage capacity in the world.
One thing I can speak for is SSDs. They are reliable, but they do have issues. Often times when you think an SSD has died it hasn't really died, usually it is due to a firmware bug. Last year I was going through a thousand SSD's from three manufactures that had been determined had failed by software or hardware troubleshooting by techs. In 60% of the failures, we were able to recover them back to regular use, the end causes being two fold, a firmware glitch that could be corrected, the other problem being the SMART data was not being read properly or improperly reported by the SSD.
We were able to implement a software solution that detected the problems that were found in the investigation and provide corrective action. This resulted in a huge drop in failures. Further interface with manufacturers has caused them to correct the various issues, which eventually rolls out to other enterprises.