3 Terabytes, 80 Watts 219
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!"
So...I read the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
"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...
Why power per storage capacity? (Score:4, Insightful)
WOW! But is it ready for the enterprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This is not a storage array. (Score:5, Insightful)
if the goal is low power (Score:3, Insightful)
If all I wanted was 4 drives why would I care? Why would I want a 1U rack? Why wouldn't I just stick them in my PC?
Re:Can I get that petabyte in Cornflower Blue? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's still not big enough! (Score:2, Insightful)
Difference between SCSI and PATA (Score:3, Insightful)
But for a smaller company, cost savings are significant if you dare to take a chance.
The biggest difference between SCSI and PATA configuration is throughput performance. A PATA RAID 5 is very likely to save your data in the event of a disk failure, just like a SCSI RAID will.
And since the disks are very cheap and you can afford a hot spare, why not just replace a drive once in a while?
Also remember that there have been rare and unusual cases with SCSI drives dying almost simultaneously and therefore trashing the RAID configuration, so a SCSI configuration is not a guarantee to success.
But obviously, with a 15K RPM rotation for SCSI, throughput is higher. However, SCSI disk space is more than 6 times more expensive.
So a PATA raid might be a good solution if you require a bit less performance and higher capacity.
I believe that the most important thing in any storage solution is the controller, since this is the technology that will actually need handle the any kind of failure correctly.
Re:It's still not big enough! (Score:3, Insightful)
Difference is, I don't have any decision power over his parliamentary procedure but he has decsion power over my technology.
Re:It's still not big enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't know what cloture was. I had no need to. Then you posted about it, and I needed to. I googled for it and now I do. I still don't really need to know (I'm not a US Senator, or even a US resident), but because it seemed like it might be at least moderately important that I knew about it, I read about it and learned. This is what moderately intelligent people do; they spot important gaps in their knowledge and then do something about them.
What Ted Stevens did, was spout nonsense on a subject that it was very, very important that he understood well. He is in charge of a committee whose responsibilities include determining whether the US section of the Internet should be regulated. He was leading the debate on this very subject, and yet displayed a complete lack of understanding of the subject in question. From The Daily Show's coverage of the speech, it seems clear that the average American television viewer has a greater understanding of the way the Internet works than this person, who, nonetheless, felt it necessary to stand up and publicly air an opinion on the matter.
Re:your file server structure? (Score:3, Insightful)