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Petabyte Storage Array

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jan 30, 2006 11:02 PM
from the cool-factor dept.
Hardware Technology
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."
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  • 1 Peta?? How many (Score:3, Funny)

    by IdleTime (561841) on Monday January 30 2006, @11:06PM (#14604337) Journal
    JPEGS would that be?
    • If every JPEG was 500 KB, 4,708,523,520 of them. This doesn't account for the operating system, if there is one. Still, when would you ever need to store nearly 5 trillion JPEGs, unless you're Google Caching?

    • Is that one billion copies of tubgirl and goatse?

    • Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:4, Funny)

      by thefirelane (586885) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @12:41AM (#14604839)
      How many JPEGs would that be?

      1 Really big one

    • Re:1 Peta?? How many (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      How many JPEGs would that be?

      All of them.
    • 1 Peta[byte]?? How many JPEGS would that be?

      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)

    by synthparadox (770735) on Monday January 30 2006, @11:07PM (#14604339) Homepage
    This is pretty interesting in that it's yet another item that we all wish we had just for overkill purposes.

    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)

      by TinyManCan (580322) on Monday January 30 2006, @11:11PM (#14604365) Homepage
      You're mistaken.

      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.

      • But again, I refer to my question. Is it worth $4 million? Are you willing to pay $4 million for something like this? Usually the people who are interested in this have their own ability & money to build a NAS or backup systems and support them.
        • If the man has 50 Terabytes of critical data that he needs to backup and ship every day, I'd say he probably has a budget that could accomidate one of these things. While multi-terabyte arrays are more common than they once were, anyone carrying around that much data still needs to spend millions just to keep their infrastructure intact.

          Now all he's got to do is get his boss to sign the check. :-P
        • WHile not wanting to say too much, that cost is definitely reasonable considering the benefits.

          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)

            by Theatetus (521747) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @12:31AM (#14604788) Journal
            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.

            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.

    • 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.

      I suspect the marketing strategy is to sell the smaller versions of the system - the petabyte version is just an assembly of modular components.

      It's nice and all, but seriously people, who's the audience?

      For the full meal deal? Probably nobody - but it makes a hell of an advertisement for the small

      • For the full meal deal? Probably nobody - but it makes a hell of an advertisement for the smaller systems in the same product line.

        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

    • It'd be awesome if a major hosting provider bought some of these and let you buy space in whatever size chunks you needed.
    • The only places I can think of that would benefit from this are supercomputing institutes
      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

  • Holy Truman, Batman! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MarkRose (820682) on Monday January 30 2006, @11:09PM (#14604352) Homepage
    Interesting calculation: If you live 80 years, that's 435.5 KB per second -- enough for a TV-quality video of your entire life.
    • yes, it can document my entire life. that sure is a lot of porn.
    • Interesting calculation: If you live 80 years, that's 435.5 KB per second -- enough for a TV-quality video of your entire life.

      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.

    • The phrase "TV-quality" is always amusing to me. Digital television is just starting to roll now in Holland (or maybe I'm just now starting to notice it) and the one feature that is supposed to sell it is the great quality of the picture. But that's not really the problem with television. Everyone I know has cable tv, which is good enough for me. The problem is there's never anything on.
      So saying that you could make a TV-quality video of your life is like saying your life sucks.
        • have them indexed by day and hour for recall, pretty easily.

          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

  • Heh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Crowhead (577505) on Monday January 30 2006, @11:12PM (#14604372)
    I was just thinking about how 4 years ago you could build a terabyte array for about $5-10,000 down from many millions 8 years ago. Today, you can get a terabyte for less than $500. In a few years, a petabyte is only going to cost $5,000. If you just buying space for future growth, it seems like a total waste of money.

    • true (Score:2, Interesting)

      by xusr (947781)
      It's amazing how quickly storage increases and prices go down. On the other hand, it's interesting to keep in mind that as amazing as an iPod nano would be in 1985, the invention of paper was the single biggest leap in storage density we've ever seen.
      • ...the invention of paper was the single biggest leap in storage density we've ever seen.
        Oh, come on -- dividing by zero doesn't count!

        (d/dx density = new medium/old medium;
        paper/nothing = n/0)
  • I love the last line -- if you just want bragging rights -- these days that'll last 3 days.

  • Been there done that (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hackstraw (262471) * on Monday January 30 2006, @11:15PM (#14604388) Homepage
    http://www.archive.org/web/petabox.php [archive.org]

    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?

    • The I/O performance of a petabox is just *slightly* lower than a DMX-3.

      This box, and the software used to manage it, make it considerably more useful than a petabox.
      • The I/O performance of a petabox is just *slightly* lower than a DMX-3.

        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
    • It's only a "Petabox" in name, not capacity. (unless by "box" they mean a 20'x8'x8' shipping container)

      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

    • The Archive is working, as I understand it, to move the Greatful Dead fan recordings off to somewhere else. Some of that content is streaming-only, and the fans keep playing the same streams over and over again. This is using up too much of the Archive's bandwidth.

  • Failure rate (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joNDoty (774185) on Monday January 30 2006, @11:22PM (#14604430)
    Let's assume for a moment that the average lifetime of one hard disk in this petabyte array is 6.5 years. Since there are 2,400 hard drives, that means that once this thing has been running for a while, you will be replacing, on average, one broken hard drive per day, for the entire lifetime of the array. That's about $350 per day in replacement parts alone!

    • Re:Failure rate (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No, it doesn't work like that. When you buy an array like (esp. from EMC) you buy a _service plan_ to go with it.

      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.

    • Let's assume for a moment that the average lifetime of one hard disk in this petabyte array is 6.5 years. Since there are 2,400 hard drives, that means that once this thing has been running for a while, you will be replacing, on average, one broken hard drive per day, for the entire lifetime of the array. That's about $350 per day in replacement parts alone!

      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
      • The likelihood of failure on any given day is not independent of any other day. Chance a drive will fail on the second day is pretty low (first day is pretty high, installation mess-ups and the like). Chances increase over time, so maintenance will follow a pattern of exponential increase. And in 6.5 years, I can have a 1PB raid under my desk at home.

    • Re:Failure rate (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TopSpin (753) * on Tuesday January 31 2006, @04:55AM (#14605573) Journal
      Large data centers often have far more than 2400 operational disks. Under these conditions, at any given moment, some fraction of all storage has faulted and repair activity is continuous. This is one reason SCSI hardware is preferred: the disks are more uniform (capacity, electrical interface, etc.,) and replacements remain available over longer intervals.

      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.

  • When will a petabyte hard drive arrive here? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rolfwind (528248) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @12:40AM (#14604836)
    The thing is built around 2,400 500GB hard drives.

    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.
    • According to the paper High Density Hard Disk Drive Trends in the USA [tomcoughlin.com], hard drive density has doubled every 12 months.

      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.

    • Petabyte drives... (Score:5, Informative)

      by jd (1658) <imipak@y3.14ahoo.com minus pi> on Tuesday January 31 2006, @01:44AM (#14605067) Homepage Journal
      It really depends and Moore's Law doesn't really apply to it. The jumps tend to be much larger and much more random. The problem is that capacity is limited by several factors: drive speed, disk rigidity, read/write-head speed and the distance the read head is from the disk surface.


      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.

  • 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...

  • I'll say it (Score:3, Funny)

    by Profane MuthaFucka (574406) <busheatskok@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 31 2006, @01:17AM (#14604983) Homepage Journal
    A petabyte ought to be enough for anybody. And I mean it this time.

  • Filed under: Peripherals (Score:3, Interesting)

    by drgonzo59 (747139) on Tuesday January 31 2006, @05:15AM (#14605623)
    I like the section heading: Peripherals

    With a beast like this that fills up a whole room, anything else becomes a peripheral....

    • It gets you a unified system designed to work as a cohesive hole, and that is easy to maintain and operate.

      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

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