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What Does One Petabyte Of Storage (And $500K) Look Like?

What Does One Petabyte Of Storage (And $500K) Look Like?
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Meet The Petarack

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?

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Top Comments
  • 22
    Benihana , January 27, 2012 12:40 PM
    It's difficult to imagine 1 PB in an area the size of a deck of playing cards, but I'm going to remember today when it does.
  • 18
    clownbaby , January 27, 2012 12:53 PM
    I remember marveling at a similar sized cabinet at the Bell Laboratories in Columbus Ohio that held a whole gigabyte. That was about twenty years ago, so I would suspect in another 20 we might be carrying PBs in our pocket.
  • 31
    anort3 , January 27, 2012 12:58 PM
    "Honey, I downloaded the internet!"
  • 12
    cangelini , January 27, 2012 12:59 PM
    haplo602from my point of view, this is a pretty low to mid end array :-)

    What do you work on, by chance? =)
  • 10
    Casper42 , January 27, 2012 2:40 PM
    Razor512Seems like a decent setup, but the electric bill will be scary running a system like that.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.
Other Comments
  • 31
    anort3 , January 27, 2012 12:58 PM
    "Honey, I downloaded the internet!"
  • 22
    Benihana , January 27, 2012 12:40 PM
    It's difficult to imagine 1 PB in an area the size of a deck of playing cards, but I'm going to remember today when it does.
  • 18
    clownbaby , January 27, 2012 12:53 PM
    I remember marveling at a similar sized cabinet at the Bell Laboratories in Columbus Ohio that held a whole gigabyte. That was about twenty years ago, so I would suspect in another 20 we might be carrying PBs in our pocket.
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