Fujitsu Announces World's Largest Capacity Storage

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."

Boring

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

I'm tired of hearing about super-large full-sized drives and RAID arrays. Where's my 250GB 2.5" notebook drive?

Re:Boring

you could probably fit all the pr0n ever made on it.....

Re:Boring

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 h

Re:Boring

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

Re:Boring

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 total

Re:Boring

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

You kids

Back in my day we only have 3 terabytes for pr0n.

My power bill is crying...

... 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 Buffa

Re:My power bill is crying...

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

Now what would be really cool...

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.

How long to boot up? How much power?

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...

Re:How long to boot up? How much power?

The old "washing machine" hard drives of the 70's had logic to power up one at a time starting with unit zero. Sequencing power on modern drives is even easier and no doubt they do it.

I don't even want to think of how much audio

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.

Re:1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs?

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].

Re:1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs?

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 pu

Re:1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs?

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.

Re:1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs?

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).

Re: 1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs?

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)

Re:1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs?

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]

Re:1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs?

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.

Re:1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs?

Sounds like we agree. Let me know if you guys need me (see .sig for details.)

Consider yourself lucky...

...you could be the guy in Fujitsu quality control that has to count them.

Re:1.36 Petabytes? Or 1.36 million gigs?

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 uni

Re:First look..

..at hugh hefner's porn server!

Not Larry Flint's?