Petabyte Storage Array 185
knight13 writes "Engadet is reporting that EMC is rolling out a petabyte RAID array. From the article, "And if you're ready for that level of storage, there's now someplace to get it: EMC has launched its first petabyte array, a version of the company's flagship Symmetrix DMX-3 system that includes nine room-filling cabinets of drives." The price? A mere $4 million."
1 Peta?? How many (Score:3, Funny)
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:2)
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:2)
ROFL
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:2)
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:2)
What scale are you using? Under short scale, that number would be called "five billion", while under long scale it would be "five thousand million" or "five milliard".
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:2)
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:5, Funny)
How about this, limit the sample to women aged 18-35, but take several photos? Maybe even more space could be saved by taking off the extra clothes...
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:2)
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:2)
Is that one billion copies of tubgirl and goatse?
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:1, Redundant)
I think you misspelled porn.
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:1)
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:4, Funny)
1 Really big one
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:2, Funny)
All of them.
Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:3, Interesting)
JPEGs are too small for the margin of error in the reporting of this 1 PB array. From the article, it appears to be a 1.2 PB array (2400 * 500 GB), presumably to push it over the 1 PiB capacity(*). And that's assuming the whole capacity is available and none of it used for redundancy. (That's a lot of data to lose over one drive failure.)
(*) The difference between 1 PB and 1 PiB is nearly 126 TB! That's a lot of space to miss over not knowing what units you're
Kinda Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I doubt they'll sell many of these. The only places I can think of that would benefit from this are supercomputing institutes, but they often build their own redudant RAID systems and/or NAS systems.
It's nice and all, but seriously people, who's the audience?
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
If this was slightly less high-end disk (DMX's are EMC's top of the line) it would be perfect for disk-to-disk backups. We send approx 50 TB a day of data to tape to send offsite. I would *love* to have the last 50 days data on disk, onsite for instant restores.
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Now all he's got to do is get his boss to sign the check.
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:1)
He probably works for a company that provides backups to other companies in a data center. He'll still need to move the data offsite and the only practical way to move that amount of data is by tape. Having a $4 million dollar array would probably mean he wouldn't have to drive to the offsite storage facility three times a day to fetch tapes to do recoveries and could spend more time reading slashdot. The money this would cost to buy and maintain could easily cover several FTEs for ma
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
Think of the petabyte array as near-line storage for the main array.
The 50TB of tapes per day going out to Iron Mountain will still be going out every day. "They" will just be doing a whole lot fewer tape recalls.
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
Imagine just once, you had to wait 4 hours for some tapes to come back onsite. Now that is four hours times approx 40,000 people (number of employees unable to work). That one outage just cost you 160,000 hours of downtime, where you could not serve your customers. Assuming you pay on average $25/per employee/per hour you've paid for the system in one go.
This is not including the amount of money lost because p
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Only if you use Enron math. You have to pay $25 per employee per hour either way. The only thing that matters is what you mentioned as a side note, revenue from customers lost during the outage. If whatever system relies on this backup is generating you $1,000,000 per hour, then an array like this would pay for itself in one four-hour outage. But, that doesn't take into account opportunity cost: you could still be better off if you put that $4 million to use generating revenue; if it made back more than the outage costs you you're still on top.
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
Well, yes and no. Let's say that the system is generating $1mm per hour in revenue. What do you think the potential backlash would be from a four hour down
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
What's that? A small form factor $1 banknote with a 1mm side?
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
Exactly my thoughts. Of course, I work in a hospital, so that's obvious to me... Diagnostic Imaging devices in a small hospital can easily put out a terabyte a year -- that's just images, no medical records, etc. If you move up to a larger hospital, a petabyte of storage for a PACS (picture archiving system) would be EXTREMELY valuable.
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect the marketing strategy is to sell the smaller versions of the system - the petabyte version is just an assembly of modular components.
For the full meal deal? Probably nobody - but it makes a hell of an advertisement for the small
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd bet you that you are wrong on this. EMC is going to sell a lot of these systems.
Previously you could get a 230 TB (? might be off, going from memory?) DMX3000 array. EMC has a lot of customers with several (many in some instances) of these installed. A good percentage of these customers would probably consolidate into a single array. Some customers like the advantages of
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
We have been in the design phase for a storage solution that would provide scalability up to an exabyte (on paper, in theory, with some dark magic and light kludges).
The only thing that has amazed me to this point is not the fact we can do it, its the number of applications that require (and the others that logically should require if they were not stuck in the 90's) a serious storage solution.
SHAMELESS PLUG BELOW:
Howev
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
When I was in the telecom field, we were required to keep a log of every call made for 6 years. Now imagine you are a tiny mom and pop organization -- let's just call it Sam and Bob's Communications. You buy another small mom-and-pop sop, Art, Trent, & Trevor. You've now got a combined customer base of, say 500 million people. Half of them also have a cell phone, and 20% have two phone lin
Re:Kinda Interesting (Score:2)
That's funny, I was saying almost the same thing about Terabyte storage not many years ago. Now I wish I had a full terabyte of space at home to store music, pictures, videos, etc.
Whoa ho ho! (Score:2)
On.
Shoulder.
But interesting none-the-less. Too bad it got modded into oblivion. Some of these "losers" could have learned a thing or two about industry. But then, you had to get all offensive.
You have to be _subtle_ with your barbs, so it flies over the heads of the moderators with PMS.
Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:1)
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:2)
You're posting on Slashdot... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you live for 80 years, that's 75 years longer than an average hard drive will last. That's 6.9 Megs of data breaking every second.
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:2)
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:3, Funny)
So saying that you could make a TV-quality video of your life is like saying your life sucks.
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:2)
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:2)
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:2)
Such a "life recording system", especially if incorporat
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a friend who has photographic memory. She can take pictures of things with her mind, and look back at them later. If she wants, she can snap an entire textbook and read it later.
The problem is, though, that whenever she wants data she still has to read it. If she doesn't study for tests, then she has to flip through textbooks in her mind to try and find the data, which is a lot more tedious than you would think. If you had a recording of
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:2)
That's where visual search tools come into use- I'm not saying we have the technology RIGHT NOW to find stuff in a 6 month archive of video- I'm saying that the storage is coming close (perpendicular recording Hitachi Microdrives are coming out in 2007, at which point you'll be able to carry 60GB around
Re:Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:2)
I don't think I have a photographic memory, but back when I was in school, I used to cram for exams by scanning (fast reading - not electronically) relevant books or texts. Then when I was in the exam room and read a question, I had to remember which page of the book the answer was on (or the subject was dealt with) and then
Heh (Score:4, Insightful)
true (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:true (Score:2)
(d/dx density = new medium/old medium;
paper/nothing = n/0)
Re:true (Score:2)
Re:true (Score:2)
Yeah but the transfer from reality to memory is inconsistent from one person to another. Need some ECC on it.
Re:Heh (Score:2)
Where? I've been looking for that! (no I'm not kidding or trolling)
Re:Heh (Score:2)
Put four of these [newegg.com] in a spare box. Price before tax+shipping: $480 for over a terrabyte of storage.
Re:Heh (Score:2)
Re:There is an explanation for this (Score:2)
Law of Accelerating Returns [wikipedia.org]
Bragging rights (Score:2)
Been there done that (Score:3, Interesting)
By those who truly care about the human tradition, and spreading the music of the Grateful Dead [archive.org] and other freely available media.
Is this another slashvertisement?
Re:Been there done that (Score:2)
This box, and the software used to manage it, make it considerably more useful than a petabox.
Re:Been there done that (Score:2)
Are you being facetious here? Any details?
Keep in mind that these are two very different beasts here. The petabox is one rack, the EMC "box" is 9 racks. More drives always gives you better performance. I'd be happy with a petabox for my music and porn. That would serve me fine for a couple of years.
My point was that this is being _advertised_ as something new. Being that most slashdotters are still in their mother's basements tryin
Re:Been there done that (Score:2)
No, the petabox is 10 racks to get a peta. You only (only?) get 100 terabytes in a rack. See the second bullet in the Overview.
Re:Been there done that (Score:2, Interesting)
From the linked site:
* High density-- 100 Terabytes per rack
* Colocation friendly-- requires our own rack to get 100TB/rack, or 50TB in a standard rack
So even with the special Internet Archive racks, you'd need 10 of the racks to get a Petabyte.
Though it seems that capricorn-tech [carpricorn-tech.com] has improved on the capacity since the Internet Archive page was written, advertising up to 80 TB per standard rack, s
Re:Been there done that (Score:2)
Failure rate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Failure rate (Score:2, Insightful)
You pay $xxx,xxx.xx up front for a years service. The EMC arrays call home when a drive is getting ready to die (i.e. well before there is _any_ data loss) and EMC sends a tech onsite. The drive is swapped out and you as the customer notice absolutely nothing, except a line in the security log where the tech showed up at the datacenter.
Re:Failure rate (Score:2)
T'was claimed that they'd had a bad batch of drives from IBM :-)
Worst part was, as the company was winding down, we had some kind of problem with the "phone-home" logic on the storage array. So every ten minutes, you'd hear the very loud and anachronistic sound of a modem dialing out and trying to warble a c
Re:Failure rate (Score:2)
Good math!
However, for a cool $4mil, hopefully this would include some kind of drive replacement program. With those raw numbers, a drive a day would c
Not Such Good Math (Score:2)
Re:Not Such Good Math (Score:2)
Bathtub model.
'nuff said.
Re:Failure rate (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't the slightest bit unusual. At any moment some fraction of the power transmission and distribution system has faulted. Some percentage of all aircraft are grounded. Various segments of all wide area communications systems are down. Repairs never cease.
$350 equates to a few minutes of aggregate labor costs spent financing, provisioning, securing and monitoring a petabyte of storage. Other large ongoing costs include power and cooling. $350/day is lost in the noise.
EMC's new offering will reduce many of these costs for a given amount of storage. The thing to do then is build data centers to host these machines by the dozen.
Re:Failure rate (Score:2)
We replaced 4-5 a week, on average.
Much better drives means lower failure rates (Score:2, Informative)
This system uses absolutely no board/controller lever redundancy, instead they use a separate file system on every disk, then mirror pairs of 1U units, and finally mirror the entire (mirrored) rack to a geographically distant location.
I am currently testing a much denser solution, the SATABeast http://ne [nexsan.com]
When will a petabyte hard drive arrive here? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder when (if) the average consumer can get 1PB harddrives?
I don't know if Moores law applies historically to harddrives, but if doubling of capacity occured every 18 months and figuring 500GB is the limit size now and the doubling continues into the future:
500GB - Now
1TB - 18 months
2 - 36
4 - 54
8 - 72
16 - 90
32 - 108
64 - 126
128 - 144
256 - 162
512 - 180
1024TB = 1PB - 198months which is 16.5 years.
Re:When will a petabyte hard drive arrive here? (Score:3, Interesting)
500GB - Now
1TB - 1 year
2 - 2
4 - 3
8 - 4
16 - 5
32 - 6
64 - 7
128 - 8
256 - 9
512 - 10
1024TB = 1PB - 11 years, Assuming that ariel density continues to double and the form factor stays the same.
Re:When will a petabyte hard drive arrive here? (Score:2)
A few data points from that paper...
1998.08 - 12Gb/sq in
1999.08 - 26.5Gb/sq in
2000.10 - 60Gb/sq in
2002 - projected at 75Gbits/sq in
1 (square inch) = 6.4516 square centimeters
The Hitachi 7K400 series is only 62Gb/sq in. That's the 400GB drive that came out last fall (Sep 2005?). GMR was rumored to top out at around 80-100Gb/sq in, IIRC.
Perpendicular recording is supposed to give us up to 230 Gb/sq in or up to 245 Gb/sq in, depending on who you ta
Petabyte drives... (Score:5, Informative)
The faster a disk spins, the more disk surface is exposed to the magnetic field used to write to the drive, so the less storage you have. Disk rigidity is important for two reasons - it limits how close the read head can get and it limits how precisely you can know how much disk surface has been visible. The faster you can either read magnetic fields or generate them, the less disk you need to write to, thus increasing storage. The distance of the read head determines the surface area exposed to the magnetic field on writing, so determines how far apart your data must be to not overlap.
A trivial question might be: Using a standard, existing hard disk (but modifying the controller as necessary) increase the capacity of a hard drive? The answer is "probably".
One way to do it would be to add enough RAM such that a fairly substantial portion of the disk can be held in ramdisk on the controller. Because you are then not reading and writing to the disk directly, but going through ramdisk, the speed of the drive becomes much less important. If you slow the drive down substantially, whilst writing to it at the same speed, the data won't be smeared over the disk as much, so you should be able to increase the density.
In practice, as disk manufacturers don't design their disks with that kind of mod in mind, you are very likely to run into significant problems with defects on the surface that simply aren't visible at 7200 or 15000 RPM. Other problems, such as stability (drives depend a lot on gyroscopic effects and aren't built to go slow), may also limit how much you can cheat on the density.
Another option would be to seriously cool the read/write head, so that you could flip the magnetic state faster. Again, you're limited. Mechanical devices don't like being freeze-dried - even when they ARE dry. However, you may be able to get some improvement that way.
If you're just looking for ANY increase in capacity, then that's trivial and requires no engineering (but some programming). Modern computers are very fast, compared to modern hard drives. If you have one physical sector per physical track, then break down the structure entirely in memory, you eliminate the need for inter-sector gaps, physical sector headers, etc. You might be able to squeeze out another 10%-15% by this method, which isn't a whole lot but isn't bad for the effort it would take.
There are very likely other mods that hard disk manufacturers could use, but which would be totally beyond anyone doing homebrew stuff. The platters probably aren't using the absolute ideal materials - let's face it, they're in business to make money and there are far more home buyers wanting cheap drives than there are perfectionists wanting perfect drives. I suspect there are other areas they could improve on, using existing technology, but won't because it's not economic.
That's probably why you see bursts of improvement. When there's a massive enough need for the extra storage, it can be achieved. When there isn't, it's not worth the extra investment.
Re:Petabyte drives... (Score:2)
That's absolutely correct, which causes me to wonder what it has to do with the post you respond to. Quoting information that does not address the relationship between rotational speed and data density does not say anything about the previous poster's claim. *How* were they incorrect to assert that it's harder to make the largest drives as fast as smaller drives? I don't deny that the reason might be different than the one stated, but simply asserting so does
I need to create my own business (Score:2)
Damn I really need to create my own business in the storage market. I am not exactly sure about what EMC provides in this $4 million package (servers, 24x7 contract, maintenance, hard disk replament, etc) but I KNOW how to create a 1 PB storage device for less than half the price ($2 million instead of $4 million). And I am pretty sure about my numbers...
I am sick of the current state of the storage market. Vendors are either designing unnecessarily expensive solutions, or are having HUGE margins...
Re:I need to create my own business (Score:2)
Yes, my $2 million USD price would include redundant disks, servers, power supplies, enclosures, disk controllers, network gear, maintenance contract with on-site technician to replace failing parts, etc. Everything would be pretty much redundant. The only thing is, the initial investment necessary to start my business (and validate my ideas) would be high: $3 million USD (first product + initial development cost + safety margin). And of course I am pretty sure that if my idea pulls off, EMC would immediat
Re:I need to create my own business (Score:2)
Yes. And I am dead serious: mostly open source apps + in-house software for the missing parts (I know exactly which ones are missing).
Re:I need to create my own business (Score:2)
No I don't work for NetApp. Could you be more specific about what would interest you ? You would buy 1000 TB for $2m USD. What about 500 TB for $1.2m USD ? 250 TB for $700k USD ? Would you like such a product to appear as a single file server on your network ? Or, say 10 or 100 independent fileservers ? What about the protocol NFS, FTP, TFTP, CIFS, other ? Do you have any power requirements (the whole thing must be
Re:I need to create my own business (Score:2)
Re:I need to create my own business (Score:2)
Re:I need to create my own business (Score:2)
To answer you question: of course no, I am not just looking at the cost of parts. I know that vendors HAVE to provide all the usual services such as maintenance, remote monitoring, parts replacement, support, help, fine-tuning, installation, etc.
Thanks for your input, guys. I am pretty confident in my approach, and I am going to seriously think about it :)
I'll say it (Score:3, Funny)
EMC just a badge (Score:2)
Filed under: Peripherals (Score:3, Interesting)
With a beast like this that fills up a whole room, anything else becomes a peripheral....
Just don't name it... (Score:2)
Rumor has it that Sony tried to use such a name for a tape system several years ago, until the North American team heard it. Not sure it that's true, even though it came from a friend that worked in Sony marketing in Canada at the time.
MadCow
Has anyone noticed (Score:2)
password hashes? (Score:2)
Man, thank god that windows has 256-chars password length
(it's all fiction, I made the numbers up. but I'm pretty sure about the size of the hashes db..)
expensive? (Score:2)
Re:A petabyte of pr0n (Score:2)
"enough for a TV-quality video of your entire life".
Conversely, this is enough for twice the pr0n you could
possibly watch (assuming you sleep and eat).
Re:A petabyte of pr0n (Score:2)
Never heard of TV dinners?
Re:A petabyte of pr0n (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A petabyte of pr0n (Score:3, Funny)
For who?
You're new here, aren't you?
Re:fp! (Score:1)
Re:Warrantless wiretaps (Score:2)
Re:Apple XServe (Score:3, Interesting)
That's generally what you pay a fortune for when you buy these big beasts.
It all boils down to what is most important for you - the money or the hassle of managing less integrated systems. The big filers are by no means the right choice for everybody, but they are nice to work with if you can justify the cost.
Features in high end storage systems like this typically include things like redundant-e
Re:Apple XServe (Score:2)
Never trust a computer you can lift, I always say.