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Hardware

420 Gigabyte Hard Drives 121

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bigger-longer-and-uncut dept.
Zach Garner writes "IBM is introducing a new line of harddrives, code named "Shark", that will start from 420gig and go up to 11 terrabyte." Now thats what I'm talking about. This kinda stuff has got to make the film industry as nervous as the recording industry. But mainly it just makes things like digital audio and video mixing a lot easier. (Update: 07/27 01:32 by CT : Course a few people noted that these things are the size of refrigerators so its not like their gonna be desktop toys any time soon either)
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420 Gigabyte Hard Drives More

420 Gigabyte Hard Drives

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  • Well. At 64kbps, you get about 2 minutes of MP3 per megabyte. So the "disks" can take between 1Y:218D:8H:00M:00S and 41Y:312D:18H:40M:00S worth of music, not including leap years.

    :)

    --
    Joao "a cup of espresso, a free few minutes, a spreadsheet, and a visit to slashdot is what mornings are all about" de Souza
  • Saw a story on them yesterday. They start at $50,000 for the low end and range as high as $120,000 for the 11 terabyte model. Pricing structure is based on how much you want to store. The machines are customized for your storage needs by IBM.
  • No amount of scanning for typos will get someone who doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're" to correct it. And on top of that, it's really disheartening to see that Taco doesn't have the time/inclination/energy to read fully and comprehend a piece that short. He seems particularly susceptible to this sort of deception with regard to hard drives- remember the 30Gb removable hard drive a few months ago that turned out to be a tape drive?

    "Misinformation for Nerds. Stuff that sounded too good to be true, so I posted it without looking and tossed on a rambling, semicoherent comment filled with misspellings and punctuation errors."
  • And of course, you do, despite the fact you can't differentiate between a plural and a possessive...
  • Even better is this spec sheet [ibm.com]. The gist is that the system is RAID 5, that it is as big as a house (pictures included) and that the disk drives go up to ... 3.36 TB (at least that's how I read it). So maybe Rob wasn't so wrong after all. The ZDnet article says 3 million for 11 TB, so you can't afford it, either.


    Romen

  • Give them a chance! First off, I'm no suit (in fact i cant even get a job anywhere, I'm only 13),But it takes a while for everythng to get settled. you dont just go blow off $10,000 and then get a bunch of office clowns that just drink coke all day and dont find news. I'm surprised andover.net has even let them keep /. all to themselves and give them money and employees and the whole bit. Give it a few months.
    -TeChY
  • Sorry about that - the actual disks really only go up to 36 GB. Sorry if I got your hopes up.


    Romen

  • FIRST OFF, I USE FREEBSD! IT DONT PERFORM BETTER UNLESS YOU HAVE ALL DAY TO FOOL WITH IT! SECOND OFF, THESE "FACIST" MODERATORS AS YOU CALL THEM ARE THE SLASHDOT USERS THEMSELVES!

    I'm feeling better now. Moderators, feel free to -2 this.
  • Is it just me, or has Slashdot been turning lame the past week or two?

    It's just you.
  • Yeah, but it'd look cool sitting in the corner of my kitchen.

    "What's that?"

    "Oh, that's my computers drive array."

    Yes, I have no dining table in my kitchen. Just two desks and 6 computers.

    Airneil.
  • capacity is not the issue. Bandwidth is.
  • Look. So he made one little mistake and everyone jumps down his throat. He just said they were disks and didn't say they were arrays. How many times have you posted something that ended up being a little wrong? I would guess more than once. And Rob posts (at least) half a dozen articles a day. . .

    All I'm saying is to cut him a little slack. . .
  • I've seen the 11tb model, up close and personal. If you're ever feeling chilly, just go stand next to the exaust port on one. Nice & toasty.

    The drives internal to it are, err, dangit, it's a TLA starting with S for Serial, not SCA, but something else.

    Very fast, external interface is LVD, the unit I've worked around (closed lab) was on two 20 meter cables strung along the celing. Sure, they're loud and run hot, but you can literally store them in the closet down the hall.

  • ANY word on prices?

    > $3*10E6
  • Rob seems to have a policy of not changing stories (except to add on a little bit at the end) once he's posted them. Not really a great way of doing things, especially if he doesn't check stories before posting them.

    What's worse, however, is the unbelievable level of ignorance this story has revealed amongst the Slashdot population.

    D, who spent all yesterday working on a Sun e3500 with a knacked rootdisk plex (courtesy of Veritas Volume Manager and dodgy GBICs).
  • we mustn't forget:

    tower = hard drive
    case = hard drive
    power supply = hard drive
    motherboard = hard drive

    as in "Press the reset button. It's on the front of the hard drive."
    or "ok, I have my monitor plugged in to the hard drive, what now?"
    or "I'm getting a CDBurner installed in my hard drive tonight."
  • These storage monsters aren't terribly exciting.
    I've used the Hitachi 5700, 7700 and 7700E. These are only exciting if throughput is the name of your game. I think some engineers around here had a cluster of workstations talking to a 7700 and a smokin' mainframe. They got approx. 300Gigs/hr in throughput.

    As for anything exciting...

    I guess you can back up your MP3's rather quickly...
    ______________________________________ ___________
    $which weed
  • SSA (Serial Storage Architecture) which is IBM's alternative to FCAL.
  • With that kind of capacity to work with, you could use full quality wav files at 1440kb/s (or something like that) and still have years of music.
  • You americans are obviously obsessed with hard drives; here in Ireland lusers have a different perceptual problem; there's no such thing as a hard drive. It's all memory. All (all) users say "I'm out of memory" when their hard disks are full. It's become automatic for me to dismiss any complaints about memory and check the machine myself to find out what's really wrong.
  • How much space could OS's address in an HDD. I know 95A (eek.. I mentioned something from Macroshit!) had a limit of 2 gigs or something... Do similar limits exist for other os'es for HDD's I am talking IDE hear, but obviously there is no way that a HDD of these sizes could be anything but SCSI....).
  • The BeFS (BeOS file system) could just about span 11 TB of data. Journaling too.

    I figure once Be goes broke (sniff) they might just release the BeOS to the public. Wouldn't that be nice.

  • Re:Not hard drives. (Score:3)

    by Tom Christiansen ( 54829 ) <tchrist@perl.com> on Tuesday July 27, 1999 @07:34AM (#1781460) Homepage
    It's all memory. All (all) users say "I'm out of memory" when their hard disks are full.
    That's severely annoying to almost all of us. But it's common enough here that I did cover it in my geekspeak correspondence table [perl.com]. The sample program there reports: When I say memory, I mean what you would call RAM, but for you memory means what I would call disk space.

    When we get enough contest entries, we'll have a nice translator tool that we can all use to talk to the um, regular people. :-) Send me mail with any suggestions or programs. Any language is ok.

  • CDW has 25 Gb IBM Hard drives [cdw.com] for the amazing, Moore's law inspired, price of $363.62

    If we take 24 of these drives, in a RAID array, allowing $1000 for a controller... the price works out to:
    24 * 365 ---> $8760
    Controller -> $1000
    -------------------
    Total price $9876
     They want more than 10 times this price... time for a reality check!

    --Mike-- [mrgoodenuf.com]

  • 216gb/hour==61.44mb/second...that is about 75% of 655mbit...you'd better not backup over a network with such a device :)
  • heh...it's extremely cool that they've made them huge, but it's still your standard hard drive format (i.e. the whole spinning disc thing), right? If I'm thinking correctly (and I doubt I am...I've been working until 3am for the last week), wouldn't tons of disks be really really slow?
    I'll be interested when high capacity static ram gets cheap and readily available...
  • Having never used a RAID system I was wondering what type of access time you could expect from such a system? How would the access time to even a fairly small array of drives compare to let's say a large desktop hard drive?

    Thanks
  • Not only is this a storage system rather than a (single) hard drive, but it also isn't much news. 420 GB storage cabinets - configured as RAID, JBOD or mirrored drives or whatever else you may fancy - are all over the market and terabyte-sized ones also. I haven't seen 11 TB configs, but then I haven't looked. Vendors tend to stress scalability and throughput, rather than sheer size.

    Sorry to spoil the party. SAN and storage systems are buzzwords in the glasshouse these days and everyone and his/her grandmother are offering them, including IBM.

    For truly huge data storage needs (petabytes and beyond) coming down the pipe, and no real technical solution in sight check Nature, June 10, 1999, p. 517. Unfortunately, you need to have a paid subscription for the online article, but you can ask me for a FAXed copy.
  • I seldom make grammatically correct statements
    while online. Sue me.
  • I suppose these are all good critiques... I agree with many of them, there have been stories I've submitted to slashdot, only to see them appear a few days later. They're old news to me, but news still to /.

    I think maybe the problem is that not enough people are submitting news stories. I used to submit stories, but got discouraged after seeing some passed up and then alternate versions posted a bit later. I understand that some posters have different viewpoints on what exactly IS news for nerds, but it's becoming rather absurd.

    This isn't really a criticism of slashdot, it's a criticism of the posters and of the userbase. The posters for deleting possible stories because they don't fit their own definition. To me, these should be left in a queue for the other posters to think about. An internal system allowing the posters to leave their thoughts on the story, and a limit in the queue of 24 hours (so a news story doesn't get stale, and to keep it tiny) Of course, worthless submissions can still be immediately deleted (e.g. flames, empty posts, comments to rob et al), but give other posters a chance to see what you thought was crap!

    Now to the users- we need to browse online news sites more! When we find a decent article we need to submit, submit, submit! To increase the quality of the submissions, once you find a good story, browse other news sites for similar stories! If you can, include two or more links in your submission including, if you can, a link to a relevant page on a company mentioned in the articles! (Sorry for all the !'s, but this really would help the quality and timing of stories.)

    I hope I don't get rob angry for criticizing slashdot, I know that's a no-no. But it isn't really an attack on slashdot, more a statement of the growing userbase but declining submission rate (I think.. I could be wrong here).

    Anyway,

    I hope Taco reads this and ponders it... it would be terrible to try to implement, I'm sure... but this is also a plea for all the users out there to 1) increase the quantity of submissions but 2) to make sure the quality of said submissions rises with quantity!

    Thanks,


  • I could care less about whether they can run Linux, as long as I know the answer to the burning quesiton: How much will they cost? An 11TB drive could be the last one I'd ever buy, but that's what they said about my 1GB drive back in '94.

  • What's a "terrabyte"? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was thinking that lunabytes should be smaller, and jovibytes should be smaller. And areobytes should be redder. Who needs these silly terrabytes anyway?

  • Wow! (Score:1)

    by DeathB ( 10047 )
    Hopefully we will be seeing these outside of mainframes and SGI's before too long has passed. It makes you wonder what will happen when the capacity exists to pass around mpeg2's like people do mp3's. Any word on how large these things are going to be? The article doesn't mention it...
  • Can't believe you turned down the opportunity to work out how much mp3 playlength you could fit on one, Rob...
  • From what I saw last night (I think CNN) this Shark "hard drive" is about the size of 2 refrigerators. Not exactly for the meek.



    -Duke Leto

    *Absolute power corrupts the absolutely corruptable.
  • Shouldn't jovibytes be huge, but still smaller than solabytes?
  • The article isn't clear that these are individual disk drives; rather, they seem to be describing a "storage appliance" or a disk array. The kicker that they go to 11 Terabytes suggests the latter.
  • If one reads the article, this is not a harddrive, but a Storage System. A quote

    "IBM said the new product line can handle from 420 gigabytes ... up to 11 terrabytes ... the highest capacity in the industry. The new storage systems, together with a refreshed line of storage tape backup products, help organizations record and track the massive volumes of information they create each day."

    These are huge boxes that live in enterprise data centers that have massive amounts of money.

    Sorry to dissapoint.

  • Not hard drives. (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 27, 1999 @03:05AM (#1781484)
    This is a storage system, like a raid unit not a hard drive. IBM currently sells something like this, which had the code name "seascape" which basically had an RS/6000 front end and lots of IBM's SSA serial disk on the back. It runs a version of ADSM (IBM's lousy backup program) to a local tape drive. The actual RS/6K is hidden from the user, so their is no actual console you can log in to. This is what IBM is promoting along with SSA as a "SAN" soloution.

    Steve Scherbinski
  • Damn, that's impressive. On the other hand, my belief is that no matter *how* big your hard drive is, you'll find a way to fill it up within 6 months of purchase...

  • It's NOT a hard drive! (Score:3)

    by Gleef ( 86 ) on Tuesday July 27, 1999 @03:11AM (#1781487) Homepage
    It's an external storage device, similar to an external RAID (in fact it probably is a RAID), it's many hard drives, plus I/O, plus a couple processors.

    You can't put this in your Pentuim, you have to plug into your external Fibre Channel or Ultra-SCSI port. These sorts of systems have been around for a while, the 430GB part isn't the impressive bit. The impressive bit is it scales up to 11TB, none of them have gotten that big before in one box.

    ----
  • As a musician . . . I WANT!!!!!

    Right now I'm constantly running out of space. You could partition and run EVERY OS on the market!!! It would almost be worth it just to partition a non-networked machine and fill your alpha-array of drives!!!!

    ANY word on prices?
  • A correction is required! If one reads the article carefully, it becomes revealed that this is an enterprise storage solution - ie a managed disk farm, and not a drive. It could be a drive if all the disks in the farm were mapped to one Logical drive, but thats not usually whats going on. The mention that it will compete with EMC should also be a hint that the cost will be in the high 6 digits.

    Devon
    Sr. Systems Engineer
    Storage Mgmt.
  • Well, AIX's max filesystem size is 1TB, max filesize is ~64GB, and max total system addressable disk of ~2PB (that's PETAbytes).

    Check out th e AIX FAQ [ohio-state.edu] section which goes over this.

    Remember, Linux is not the only OS out there......
  • The next Star Wars film (Episode 2) is being shot digitally. It will be the first movie to be completely digital. By the time it is released, more movie theaters will support digital projection of the movie as well, otherwise it still requires the digital images to be printed to an analog film strip. But when we get HDTV/DVD players, it will be easy to remaster the movie onto them.

    Spyky
  • It'll only be the last one you buy if you're aged 80 or over right now. That or HDDs will become obsolete altogether.

    C'mon - I could fill that sucker now given a few years. Just wait 'til 3D immersive worlds with over billions of unique locations and for $5 on MiniminiminiNanoware from the newsagent!! That'll fill 'er!

  • Slashdot no longer cutting edge (Score:3)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Tuesday July 27, 1999 @05:16AM (#1781496)
    It used to be that I heard about things first on /. and then on the radio that night or the next morning.

    Then I started hearing things on the mainstream radio news in the morning and seeing them on /. when I got to work.

    Then I heard a story on NPR on Friday that I saw on /. on Monday.

    I heard about IBM's Shark on yesterday morning from a mainstream Seattle news radio station. A very lame one. Furthermore, that "reporter" got the story right the first time around and didn't need an update to tell us the drives would be big and expensive.

    I'm sure this post will be moderated down as a troll or offtopic or something, but before it goes, heed the warning CmdrTaco--the quality of your readership is directly related to the quality of your news site. If you cut corners we cut out.
    ---
    Put Hemos through English 101!
  • Re: price

    Depends on whose pricing they're competing with. If they're shooting for EMC's market, and aren't going to undercut them, then I'd guess that the 420GB configuration will be something like $250,000.

    They will probably only sell the unit with support contracts that cost .2 * (cost of unit) for a year's worth of service.

    -Peter
  • What on earth did you all think made it worthwhile posting all that drivel?

    These guys only run this site, not all sites - leave if you don't like and go elsewhere.
  • Illiterate, No. Boob, Perhaps.
    Though I did part company with nearly all Microsoft products over two years ago, shortly after graduating the eighth grade. I feel I'm doing pretty well for myself, and I don't think that I need to have my intelligence insulted by you or anyone else.
  • A drive has about as much to do with a disk as has a wheel with a tire. I wonder whether peecee weenies get flat wheels. :-)

  • I'm looking into setting up a data center for home use (MP3's and DVD's) and I'm trying to find the best price per MB. I'm sure other people here have researched this far better than I have. Any comments?

    I'm looking to store 1 terabyte or more. Here are the prices I came up with for 1 terabyte.

    HDs - ($10/Gig) cheapest ratio seems to be 17Gig IDEs for $160. That's about $10K for 1 TB when you add all the IDE controllers.

    tapes - ($7/Gig) 35Gig tapes themself are only about $2/Gig, but a robotic tape changer is about $5k (anyone see any cheaper ones?) Draw back of tapes is the seek time. 30-60 seconds for a seek and at least double that for tape changes. But, caching/preseek solves this problem for music, and movies are rarely watched so a 2 minute setup time is ok by me.

    Cd - More than tape and no better seek time (with changer) and it's a big hassle to burn CDs. I didn't look into for that reason.
  • Here are a few interesting facts taken from an interview with IBM in the latest issue of MaximumPC:

    Areal Density increases 60% every year, on average. At this rate, HD capacity increase by a factor of 10 every 5 years. Considering the largest HD for sale right now is 32 GB, in 7 years we should have 1 Terabyte drives in our computers.

    Yum... while I haven't filled my 18 or so GIGs yet, and I have had my computer for nearly a year... I still want more. :-)

  • Ack! (Score:1)

    by jrs ( 27486 )
    How would you defrag/scan disk/format/fdisk/whatever this drive? It would take about a month :)
  • Don't forget

    3½" Floppy = hard drive

    I've had way too many newbies try to tell me that the 3½" floppies were officially called "hard disk" or "hard drive", and the term was developed to distinguish them from the floppy 5¼" ones. At this point, I'm usually tempted to bust open their floppy, and show them how floppy it really is. If they still don't believe me, then I get to bust open their hard drive.

    ----
  • RAID mirroring doesn't count as a backup. One accidental rm -rf / and your fscked. Speaking of fsck, how many months? Also, RAID won't help file system corruption or {h,cr}ackers.
  • How do you back up an 11TB system?

    Simple; to another one. :-)
  • Also, the 'harddrive' and 'terrabyte' misspellings were in the quoted text from the contributor.. not Rob.

    Aren't those things just cut-n-pasted from the submission?
  • This is not a hard drive - it's an external storage cabinet. BIG DIFFERENCE, FOLKS!

    And it's not *that* much bigger than what EMC offers now, since you can get their cabinets with multi-terabytes as well.

    What's the saying? A terabyte here, a terabyte there...
  • Intesting about "how much it cost". My lie of questions would be:

    1: How much space do it take
    2: How much power do it comsume
    3: How much noise do it make
    4: How much do it cost (take 1, 2 and 3) into that.

    As I have experience with how much a storage system from IBM can fill in space, then I would not buy 11 TB right now to my Linux box (and I don't think it would run there - but problary on an IBM mainframe).

    But as a comment, I can tell that last year I planed to get to to have 1 TB online this year in my Linux server. But the plan have canceled.

    I will await better, smaller (nonmechanical ?) disks - and file systems that can perform on those (SGI's open source file system might be one of them).

    Sincerely

    Bent
  • Using a traditional DVD player and a LCD projecter would yield very poor quality results when projected on to a very large screen. DVD resolution is around 500 lines the theoretical max of standard NTSC television (HDTV will of course enhance that). Even the highest HDTV (1080 vertical lines) standard does not have quite the resolution for a full movie theater screen (>20"). Star Wars will be recorded at something greater then 1600X1200, at 16:9 aspect ratio. I wish I could remember exactly what the resolution is, maybe someone else knows.
  • Typically devices like these run journaling file systems, so you don't fsck them.
  • The ones I've seen/worked with also offer snapshot capability, so you can revert files/directories to lastnight/last week.

    Is also good for backing up a consistant filespace. "This system as it was at exactly midnight."

    --Dan

  • Theoretical capacity of ext2? 2terr, 4?

    Useful? 9 gig.

    No? Try to fsck that and have the system back in a reasonable time.

    What, 9 isn't enough pain? Try 25. See what happens when that once-in-a-blue-moon(that strangly happens every other week) kernel 'oops' happens and your primary storage array is down while e2fsck is looking at 100% of a 99.9% clean disk.

    Is it possible to stop hyping linux for about another 12 months until there's something to hype about? Sorry to dissapoint the kiddiez, but it's NOT ready for serious applications. Personal servers, development workstations (Ha! if you want to produce code incompatable with everything else.) ... possibly samba/dhcp on a small office LAN. Scale beyond that and you start failing.

    (Mind you, I said something negative about linux, so I must be a troll. Never mind the fact that I run my entire network on it so know firsthand just how "stable" it really is in production.

    --Dan

  • One question remains ... (Score:3)

    by felicity ( 870 ) on Tuesday July 27, 1999 @03:25AM (#1781520)
    ... How the heck do you back these things up? I've got a 400Gb NetApp filer (network raid array), and backing it up is a royal pain. How in the !#$^& do you backup 11Tb?

    Apparently at the annual USENIX conference, there was a talk which mentioned the fact that 1Tb disks on the desktop would not be outrageous in the next few years. That's what I'd need. All of the engineers w/ 1Tb of storage space.

  • Re:Not hard drives. (Score:3)

    by Tom Christiansen ( 54829 ) <tchrist@perl.com> on Tuesday July 27, 1999 @03:28AM (#1781522) Homepage
    The geek-to-luser [perl.com] translation table has more than one technical interpretation of what the mundanes means when they say "hard drive":
    1. controller = hard drive
    2. disk = hard drive
    3. disk controller = hard drive
    4. disk drive = hard drive
    5. drive = hard drive
    6. file system = hard drive
    7. logical disk = hard drive
    8. mount point = hard drive
    9. partition = hard drive
    10. physical disk = hard drive
    As you see, they aren't particularly precise. It's no surprise that this too should end up being called a "hard drive". Nearly everything is. :-)
  • Be nice. Rob does have a life you know. The purpose of /. is links and discussion forum. We can't expect EVERYONE to know EVERYTHING, and do you have any idea how many submitted articles the crew is looking at right now?
  • After my two year stint in tech support (eeggh), there certainly are a LOT more things that lusers call hard drives...

    11. AT Chassis = hard drive
    12. expansion slot = hard drive
    (as in "my modem doesn't have lights... it's installed in the hard drive")
    13. CPU = hard drive
    ("My hard drive says 'intel inside'.")


    and so on and so forth. I think we can blame first grade classes that taught the three parts of the computer... And all along I though the *processor* was important. Silly me.

    -Chris
  • and hence can't have a single filesystem striped across it (atleast not in the sense that ext2fs is a filesystem), but I have to wonder... What is the upward limit on the size of an ext2fs partition?

    The capacity of hard drives seems to be increasing exponentially, and I wonder how long ext2fs will remain serviceable. Of course, there are a few replacements already in the works, and hopefully we'll have the IRIX filesystem soon, anyway.

    All that said, everything important on my system (less the mp3's) still fits on a 1.6 GB drive. Linux installs just *don't* take that much space.
    Maybe I should get into sound editing to fill up my other drive...

    --Lenny
  • Here's an article with a little more information:

    http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153, 1015697,00.html



    -capt.
  • This is a storage system, not a 'hard disk'.
    These things already exist, though this one may be a cut above the rest. Sun has a storage array system, so do others.
    They allow you do add dozens, or possibly even hundreds of SCSI drives, allow those drives to be accessed quickly and efficiently, and provide for raid-like striping and redundancy.
    Some, you can simply buy the chassis, get it hooked up, add a few drives to it, and when you need more space, just slap a new drive in, of whatever size, and things will automatically assimilate the new space.

  • I even had a client once who thought that the whole computer was contained in her monitor and that the huge thing under it was the hard drive....

    What is the world teaching commoners these days?
  • I don't rightly know how you back up 11Tb. Probably one of those robotic high-speed tape silos. Maybe a few of them.

    As to your 400Gb NetApp filer.. get a backup library, aka jukebox, something using about a dozen or so 35GB DLT tapes.
    Or perhaps there is something even bigger.. I've never had to look..
  • I don't know how this one is handled, but if it's similar to Sun's SparcStorage arrays, yes, you can. (depends on your OS how much swap is actually useful, however)

    Proximity may be a factor, as it was connected through fibre channel, and I've heard of people storing arrays in other rooms/buildings, as part of disaster recovery programs.
  • Keep in mind that these are not for personal use. They're going to be competing with EMC, a company that has been producing similar products for some time now. These are corporate enterprise solutions, not home hard drives.
  • Exabyte x200 [exabyte.com]:

    2 terabytes, 216 gigabytes/hr.
    Not cheap, but if you have the money for a disk array, you most likely have the money for a tape library, too.

  • Just to be informative some people that works with SSA sad that it has some bugs and that Fibre Channel is better for the same applications.
  • Here's one more from IBM itself. This ones a lot more detailed.

    http://www.storage.ibm.com/press/disk/990726.htm


    -capt.

  • Re:One question remains ... (Score:3)

    by Ami Ganguli ( 921 ) on Tuesday July 27, 1999 @03:49AM (#1781540) Homepage

    Two things:

    1. The advantage of the storage subsystem is that you can attach it to multiple hosts with high-speed connections. And I don't mean wimpy SCSI speeds. So you attach your backup server directly to the storage system via fibre channel and back it up to 10 Gig tape cartridges in a tape library (basically a huge jukebox).

    2. Those 11 Terabytes are probably a huge database that supports incremental backups. Basically, you NEVER do a full backup. A modern backup manager will reclaim and consolidate pools of incremental backup so you don't have to worry about restoring all the incrementals in some kind of sequence.

    By the time you get 1Tb on your desktop tape technology will be available to back it up. It might still take three or four tapes for a full backup, but that's reasonable.

  • Re:MP3z (Score:1)

    by dpash ( 5685 )
    probably wrong, but about 9.8 months on the smallest

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