What Does One Petabyte Of Storage (And $500K) Look Like?
What Does One Petabyte Of Storage (And $500K) Look Like?We all know what a megabyte is, and gigabytes are familiar as well. Terabytes were more recently folded into our vocabulary. But there’s a good chance that many enthusiasts still haven't wrapped their minds around the idea of a petabyte.
In short, we’re talking about one thousand terabytes, or enough space for 20 000 Blu-ray movie rips. Although we’re a long way from seeing petabytes of data used in a desktop context, a company called Aberdeen recently offered to ship us a more business-oriented solution already capable of serving up a petabyte of data for a cool half a million bucks. I thought about taking the company up on its offer, but ultimately decided that there was no way for me to tax its potential given the equipment currently in our Bakersfield lab. So, I thought I’d push Aberdeen for more information on its creation and break down its internals.
What, exactly, does it take to deliver a petabyte of storage, and what do you get for that nice, even price tag of $495 000?
What do you work on, by chance? =)
But then again, the servers I work on barely use 10TB of storage.
Lets see....
I work for HP and we sell a bunch of these for various uses:
http://www.hp.com/go/mds600
Holds 70 x 2TB (and soon to be 3TB) drives in a 5U foot print.
Can easily hold 6 of these in a single rack (840 TB) and possibly a bit more but you have to actually look at things like floor weight at that point.
I am working on a project right now that involves Video Surveillance and the customer bought 4 fully loaded X9720s which have 912TB Useable (After RAID6 and online spares). The full 3.6PB takes 8 racks (4 of them have 10U free but the factory always builds them a certain way).
The scary part is once all their cameras are online, if they record at the higher bitrate offered by the cameras, this 3.6PB will only hold about 60 days worth of video before it starts eating the old data.
They have the ability and long term plan to double or triple the storage.
Other uses are instead of 2TB drives you can put 70 x 600GB 15K rpm drives.
Thats the basis for the high end VDI Reference Architecture published on our web page.
Each 35 drive drawer is managed by a single blade server and converts the local disk to an iSCSI node. Then you cluster storage volumes across multiple iSCSI nodes (known as Network RAID because you are striping or mirroring across completely different nodes for maximum redundancy)
And all of these are only considered mid level storage.
The truly high end ignores density and goes for raw horsepower like the new 3Par V800.
So Yes, I agree with haplo602. Not very high end when comparing to corporate customers.
Sorry
1/ the caching; you could have 48GB of ram or more, this is for your server between able to handle to load of your I/Os and nothing more. It requires real caching to proper handle identical request like specific files like word, excel, or even a vmdk.
With proper caching, like the one we have on our gear, you can cache a couple of vmdk used to boot storm a full stack of virtual desktop... access it once on your disks, get it from fast SSD cache
2/ looking at the pictures, the RAID adapter are not battery powered, so does it mean that there is no protection of your data during a controller lost? This is good to have a dual "server" to protect against failure but if you last writing to your DB are lost... basically, you run into trouble.
Enterprise storage is using interconnect card between the controllers with some cache, we call that NVRAM, and if one is going down, this cache is battery powered and will be accessed by the remaining node to discard the set of data o disks.
3/ they do speak about failover mechanism, this is also scary, is this automatically done in a transparent way for the different protocols?
4/ there is no concept of tiering, performance or workload type. This kind of setup will not fit for all...
Well you will understand like Casper42 said, this is quite an expensive not optimal setup!
Check out http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/
this is 360 3TB SATA drives, this is is not for performance but pure capacity like backup or cheap disaster recovery site
HP Storageworks EVAs and XPs ... also some EMC arrays ...
funny you mention that, i just did math a bit ago on the intel 14nm process.
lets assume that chip size means nothing, because i cant find chip size of ssd boards so just pcb thickness of 1.5mm
playing cards have an area of about 5645mm
and are about 15.87mm thick
in order to even cram 1/4 a pb into that area, you need to be at about a 9nm process. for a full tb, you need to be at a 4.5nm process.
now i don't know about storage, but at least with the cpu, i remember it being said that 6nm would be the limit. well, 6 or 7 but 6 stands out more.
eh, an MDS is a bit above stupid JBOD :-))) they are build for capacity and basic redundancy. minimal performance.
ROFL... now I have coffee all over my keyboard. You owe me a cleanup, man :-)