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Fujitsu Announces World's Largest Capacity Storage 59

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the putting-it-on-the-table-to-measure dept.
Adam Eliason writes to tell us that Fujitsu has announced the world's largest capacity storage array. From the article: "the ETERNUS 8000 and ETERNUS 4000 storage arrays. Weighing in at 1.36 petabytes, or 1.36 million gigabytes, the ETERNUS file storage arrays push the envelope for enterprise data storage systems. Fujitsu uses 2,760 nearline fibre-channel 500GB disk drives in its flagship ETERNUS server (model 2100) and can be configured with up to 256GB of cache."
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Fujitsu Announces World's Largest Capacity Storage More

Fujitsu Announces World's Largest Capacity Storage

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  • Boring (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Devistater ( 593822 ) * <devistaterNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:19AM (#15195142)
    This is boring, set up an array of 14 petaboxes and you have the same thing. http://www.archive.org/web/petabox.php [archive.org] Nothing new here, except maybe using 500gig drives to do so. WOW what an idea!

    • Re:Boring (Score:4, Insightful)

      by shmlco ( 594907 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:22AM (#15195153) Homepage
      I'm tired of hearing about super-large full-sized drives and RAID arrays. Where's my 250GB 2.5" notebook drive?

      • Re:Boring (Score:2, Funny)

        by hector_uk ( 882132 )
        you could probably fit all the pr0n ever made on it.....
      • Looks like 160gig (the new perpendicular recording) is as high as laptop hdds go at the moment:
        http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822148073 [newegg.com]

        But you could just get a normal 3.5" drive and shove it in a USB case.

        For that matter, you could have one 160 gig laptop drive inside, and one outside in a USB case, sometimes laptop hdds dont need externally powered USB cases, they can be powered by the USB port. And they are pretty tiny and easy to carry. Using two 160 gig drives would be over your 2
        • but then you have both an extra drives worth of power draw and it's external, which is prone to more damage.
          If anything put the drive in the option bay in place of the DVD.
          -nB
        • All I know is that if I'm going to be running a half-dozen different OS'es on my notebook I'm going to need a LOT more space.
    • Not even close. With a PetaBox [capricorn-tech.com] you get a rack filled back-to-back with really low end PC hardware (VIA C3) and a boatload of IDE disk.

      With the Eternus [fujitsu.com] you get a disk array that you attach to your SAN.

      They are two completely different products for totally different jobs.
      You'd run you financial database on a Sun attached to a Eternus.
      You'd run your Google clone off of a PetaBox.

    • It's not as easy as you may think to get good performance out of very large arrays. What would you use to cluster those petaboxes and provide a unified frontend to the cluster while maintaining a high IOPS and throughput?

      You're right that there's not that much new here, but the first half of your comment indicates you have no idea the level of complexity involved in building an array this big.

  • You kids (Score:3, Funny)

    by mboverload ( 657893 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @04:27AM (#15195162) Journal
    Back in my day we only have 3 terabytes for pr0n.
  • ... If by any chance my appartment electricity counter does not explode, it's going to cost me more in electricity just to keep the damn' ting running than I can afford.

    So, what would be the highest AFFORDABLE capacity storage ?

    (I'm currently using a Buffalo TeraStation, a bit slow but not full yet)
    • They would be much cheaper to keep running than the thousands of 73G and 146G drives many of us are using now.

      One of them could easily replace the 30ish EMC systems current running here - with 75% space left over - and save a fortune on service and power. 256G of cache isn't something terribly impressive, though, as both EMC and HDS has had that option for many years.

    • Can't they have some sort of Power-up-on-demand? Running only those needed at the moment shouldn't be to difficult or time-consuming I believe.

      • I would imagine that those drives are being continually accessed. Besides, any time a drive is powered down, you get a very slight chance that it won't start back up again. That is why drives have a rated number of start-stop cycles. In a RAID, it's not that big of a deal, but it is still more expensive than the minor cost savings you might get from powering the drive down only to start it up again in a few minutes. For home use, I can see it being worthwhile as the drive might not be used except a few
  • "Weighing in at 1.36 petabytes, or 1.36 million gigabytes"

    I'm not mathematician, but isn't one gig 1024 MB? And one MB 1024 kB? And one tera 1024 GB, etc.. you get the picture...

    • Re:1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @05:30AM (#15195284) Homepage
      No, you're confused with Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, Tebi and Pebi.
      But they've only been around since 1998, so you're forgiven ;)
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix [wikipedia.org].
      • Yeah, but I think that "implicitly" in the storage domain, a kilo=1024 (as in the networking domain a kilo=1000)
        • I think IMPLICITLY in the storage domain, a kilo=1000 and a giga=100000

          have you EVERY purchased a hard drive? have you EVER seen the disclaimer on the side of the box?

          here is seagates take
          http://www.seagate.com/products/discselect/glossar y/index.html#cap [seagate.com]
          Capacity:
          Capacity is the amount of data that the drive can store, after formatting. Most disc drive companies, including Seagate, calculate disc capacity based on the assumption that 1 megabyte = 1000 kilobytes and 1 gigabyte=1000 megabytes.
          • OK, didn't wanna do the karma-wikipedia-linking-whoring, but you didn't leaveme the choice this time ;-)

            Gigabyte [wikipedia.org]

            1,073,741,824 bytes, equal to 10243, or 230 bytes. This is the definition used for computer memory sizes, and most often used in computer engineering, computer science, and most aspects of computer operating systems.

            Well alright, it only half proves my point, mostly that it says right above that that "1,000,000,000 bytes is the decimal definition used in telecommunications (such as network spe

            • Computer memory is not HD space. Hard-drives are the exception to the rule. So a 100GB hard drive will not be reported as 100GB by the OS. You can hate it, as I do, but it's now pretty much implicit regarding hard-drives.
            • Whatever the technical definition of gigabyte should be or is, matters not to me or my post.

              What does matter to me- and the element I responded too, was that the original poster has COMPLETELY wrong a claim that "hard drive manufacturers call it like it should be at 1024 per K"

              anyone who works with Hard drives (the small 3.5" or 2.5" or smaller elements that require power and ribbon cables as opposed to
              'Cletus, you know the hard drive of a computah is what doesn't mean a monitor or keyboard" )

              KNOWS
          • I think IMPLICITLY in the storage domain, a kilo=1000 and a giga=100000

            I think you're short a couple decimal places there on your "giga" value. Where byte=1, a kilobyte would be 1,000, a megabyte would be 1,000,000, and a gigabyte would be 1,000,000,000.

            For sake of this argument (and not to be extended outside of this conversation), kilo==kebi, mega==mebi, and giga==gibi.
      • The folks that came up with those `standards' should be put against the wall...when is that bloody revolution ?
      • Or maybe using the standard most of the computer world, including but not limited to operating systems, applications, RAM, GFX card and so on use for MB/GB/TB/PB? And if you buy a 1Mbit DSL line here you will get 1024kbit.

        Face it, the hard disk industry pulled a real cheap shot by shipping 1,000,000,000 bytes where the user expected 1,073,741,824. You can quote me SI standards up and down but I assure you that they didn't give a flying fuck about that, except as a convienient excuse.

        Yes, I'm in favor of usi
        • I'm not sure where you are buying DSL, but the datacoms world has been using 1k == 1000 for decades now, long before storage vendors caught onto it.

        • And if you buy a 1Mbit DSL line here you will get 1024kbit.

          Not on any DSL I've ever seen. Can you provide evidence for this claim? In general, data communications speeds have always been measured with SI prefixes (powers of ten, not powers of two).

          Face it, the hard disk industry pulled a real cheap shot by shipping 1,000,000,000 bytes where the user expected 1,073,741,824.

          Umm, if the user expected that, it's because the user didn't know anything about hard drives. The first hard drive ever, in 19

          • Well, I can't definitely say that DSL uses 1024kbit to mean 1mbit, but I do assume they operate on powers of 2, as my DSL (before it was upgraded) was 384kbps down. And now I have a "1.5Mb/384Kb" line. So, based on the Kb numbers they quote, I'm led to assume that the 1.5Mb is actually 1536Kb. Of course this may not be the case, but it's what the numbers imply.

            • Well, I can't definitely say that DSL uses 1024kbit to mean 1mbit, but I do assume they operate on powers of 2, as my DSL (before it was upgraded) was 384kbps down.

              It would be nice to hear from someone who actually works on ADSL technology, but I've done a lot of data comms work with other technologies, and it's always been base 10. I would expect that 384kbps actually means ~384000 bits per second, including overhead bits for framing, etc. I agree that 384 looks suspiciously power-of-two-ish, though,

        • Yes, I'm in favor of using MiB, GiB etc to end this confusion

          So am I, as long as it doesn't confuse the steel industry and their units of kips (kilopounds of force (1000 lbs)), and the computer industry and their MIPS (millions of instructions per second) and KIPS (thousands of...).

          Meanwhile, don't confuse the musicians. (1.36 million gigs? How many sets is that? And how many songs per set?)

          Finally, to Stephen Colbert [imdb.com]: Megamerican? Keep kicking it up and what do you get? Gigamerican, Teramerican, Peta
    • You're a company, trying to outdo other companies. Would you rather have a gigabyte be 1,000,000,000 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes? Let's take a 60 gig drive, which now has 60,000,000,000 bytes. You could call it 60 gigabytes, or 55.9 gigabytes (binary). Which would you do? Now, at the level of 1.36 PB, it would make the difference between 1.36GB and 1.21GiB. So, it's a marketing thing. You want to sound like you have as much space as your competitors, and nerds may know that 60GB=55.9GiB, but people who th

      • So, it's a marketing thing.

        Actually, it's a historical thing. The first hard drives were measured with base 10 units, because the storage technologies that had preceded them -- punched cards and magnetic tapes -- had also been measured with base 10 units. Those devices had storage measured in base 10 units because it was the most convenient and logical way to count. Early in the history of computing, memory was also measured in base 10 units, too, but that changed because it was significantly easier t

        • My favorite is the inconsistent floppy disk usage.

          A 3.5 inch, high-density floppy disk is 1440 binary kilobytes (or kibibytes, for you wierdos who like the term.) Or 1,474,560 bytes. Yet floppy disk manufacturers (and most consumers) refer to them as 1.44 megabytes. That would imply 1.44 * 1024 * 1024 = 1,509,949.4 bytes, which is incorrect. (Or 1.44 * 1000 * 1000 = 1,440,000, which is also incorrect.) So the commonly accepted terminology is a bastard base-10/base-2 multiplication mix.

          Then there are the
    • ...you could be the guy in Fujitsu quality control that has to count them.
  • ..at hugh hefner's porn server!
  • I'll take two please.
  • You don't even want to imagine a beowulf cluster of those...

  • Now what would be really cool... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) * on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @07:14AM (#15195522) Homepage Journal
    With that many drives and a bit extra investment you could afford to do some custom drives. Develop some 500G drives with wafer-scale parallel read heads in which you can read the entire contents of a disk once per revolution and have compare circuitry out on the heads looking for matches. With all the drives synchronized to do that in parallel, you get something like 120 searches/sec of the full text of the entire petabyte.

    Now a Beowulf cluster of those would be cool.

  • Sounds like the Japanese are overcompensating for shortcomings elsewhere.
  • A large company buys prodcusts from another large company and puts those parts together in one package. I mean really this is not news. It might be nice to have a single point product order for al arge datacenter, but how hard is it really to connect a bunch of HD's with infiniband? And with fibrechannel I'm assuming they are using Seagate drives. I only see SATA and SCSI reaching 300gigs on their website.

    --
    So who is hotter? Ali of Ali's Sister?

  • How long to boot up? How much power? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @10:45AM (#15196586)
    A quick bit of math tells me that if they spun all those drives up at the same time the ting would draw at least 300 amps at 220V. Since this thing probably plugs into a 30 amp circuit, I wonder how long it takes to complete the staggered spinup... I wonder how long it takes for the power usage costs to exceed the purchase price...

  • Based on the highest quality of standard definition video on a 4.7 GB DVD (one hour), this thing would store just a bit over 33 YEARS of video. I don't even want to think of how much audio that would hold in MP3 format.

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