Disclosure: I work at IBM Research where
this work is done.
A couple of corrections to the rather amusing
thread here at shlashdot. The name of my
colleague is Robert Garner, not Gardner.
Each brick holds just a little bit less
than a cool Terabyte, not 80 Gigabytes, i.e. the entire prototype 3x3x3 cube stores
26 Terabytes. Think of the text and the images
of all the books in the library of Congress or
about 6000 Hollywood movies as about that amount
of data. A Petabyte (= 1 million Gigabyte) storage system, using
state-of-the art disks combined with IceCube system technology is
surprisingly small; I leave it to the readers
to do the math.
When one or several bricks fail - YOU LEAVE
THEM IN THE CUBE until the machine has reached
the end of its economical lifetime. Again,
YOU LEAVE DEAD BRICKS IN THE CUBE. This has
many benefits, which any experienced systems
engineer can attest to.
Of course, here is where the
(software) magic comes into the picture, plus
some hardnosed engineering and systems anlysis. It is way outside the scope of this thread to describe in any detail.
As one british reporter once observed:
'THE ICECUBE TENET IS TO LIVE AND LET DIE'. He got it right.
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Disclosure: I work at IBM Research where this work is done. A couple of corrections to the rather amusing thread here at shlashdot. The name of my colleague is Robert Garner, not Gardner. Each brick holds just a little bit less than a cool Terabyte, not 80 Gigabytes, i.e. the entire prototype 3x3x3 cube stores 26 Terabytes. Think of the text and the images of all the books in the library of Congress or about 6000 Hollywood movies as about that amount of data. A Petabyte (= 1 million Gigabyte) storage system, using state-of-the art disks combined with IceCube system technology is surprisingly small; I leave it to the readers to do the math. When one or several bricks fail - YOU LEAVE THEM IN THE CUBE until the machine has reached the end of its economical lifetime. Again, YOU LEAVE DEAD BRICKS IN THE CUBE. This has many benefits, which any experienced systems engineer can attest to. Of course, here is where the (software) magic comes into the picture, plus some hardnosed engineering and systems anlysis. It is way outside the scope of this thread to describe in any detail. As one british reporter once observed: 'THE ICECUBE TENET IS TO LIVE AND LET DIE'. He got it right.