Petabyte Storage Array

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

JPEGS would that be?

Re:1 Peta?? How many

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?

Re:1 Peta?? How many

>What if someone wanted to make a photo album with 1 picture for each person on the planet?

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

How many JPEGs would that be?

1 Really big one

Kinda Interesting

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

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.

Re:Kinda Interesting

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 tha

Re:Kinda Interesting

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.

Re:Kinda 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.

I suspect the marketing strategy is to sell th

Re:Kinda Interesting

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 (?

Holy Truman, Batman!

Interesting calculation: If you live 80 years, that's 435.5 KB per second -- enough for a TV-quality video of your entire life.

Re:Holy Truman, Batman!

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 se

Re:Holy Truman, Batman!

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 re

Heh

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.

Been there done that

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?

Failure rate

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

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?

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.

Re:When will a petabyte hard drive arrive here?

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 continu

Petabyte drives...

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.

I'll say it

A petabyte ought to be enough for anybody. And I mean it this time.

Filed under: Peripherals

I like the section heading: Peripherals

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

Re:A petabyte of pr0n

1 Petabyte is enough pr0n?

For who?

You're new here, aren't you? :)

Re:A petabyte of pr0n

I pity you.

Re:Apple XServe

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