Over a Petabyte of storage in a single namespace or volume!

[LarryRAguilar]

Is it true? Over a full petabyte of storage in a rack under a single namespace or volume. Aberdeen LLC is claiming to have achieved this and displayed it at VMworld in Las Vegas, did anyone else see it?
www.Petarack.com

 

[T_Yamamoto]

It could be true quite possibly

alot of 1 TB HDD's

 

[LarryRAguilar]

I'm pretty sure they are using 3TB Drives.

 

[LarryRAguilar]

‎
9,007,199,254,740,992 bits

1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes

1,099,511,627,776 kilobytes

1,073,741,824 megabytes

1,048,576 gigabytes

1,024 terabytes

1 petabyte

0.0009765625 exabytes

0.0000009536 zettabytes

​

[link removed]

Giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but duplicate links in one thread is a no go.

Welcome to the forums, obey the forum guidelines, don't spam us

Moderator jvroig

 

[lsv]

Nice ad...

 

[exdeath]

No SSD no care. HDDs need to go extinct, along with the phrases we are stuck with because of them, such as "kilobytes per second" and "megabytes per second".

 

[Shmee]

lol megabytes/second is even used to measure SSD and RAM. It may be hundreds, or even thousands or tens of, but it is still used.

 

[shortylickens]

No he was implying we need to eventually be able to measure them in gigabytes per second. Which will take many, MANY years of research and improvement.

 

[Voo]

No SSD no care. HDDs need to go extinct, along with the phrases we are stuck with because of them, such as "kilobytes per second" and "megabytes per second".

Why? The way mass storage is most often used random access speed is basically uninteresting and you can get a faster sequential r/w with HDDs than SSDs if you're limited by price (and as side effect get much more storage too).

I don't see any reason why I should replace my 2tb drives that store multimedia and backups - even if SSDs weren't more expensive and equally large I wouldn't gain anything by doing that.. SSDs are fine if you need fast random access - if you don't the advantages are negligible.

 

[yinan]

I hope they dont plan on presenting this via Windows. You cant have a single NTFS volume > 256 TB.

 

[LarryRAguilar]

They are using Nexenta’s ZFS which allows unlimited volume size

 

[LarryRAguilar]

Funny stuff on your web link!

 

[LarryRAguilar]

I came across another petabyte storage system; however they do not provide many details, pricing or pictures. In essence, it is probably only exist on paper.

http://www.zerowait.com/index.php/simplstor/simplstor-petabyte?gclid=CIq0j8aZmKsCFSkBQAodWQGQmw

I also recently read an article that IBM is in the works of creating a 20 Petabyte system, how crazy is that? I can't imagine what an exabyte looks like! With all the 3D movies coming out, it will not be long before we see exabytes. :\

 

[Rubycon]

I predict someone will be exabyte-stage left soon.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I might reach that eventually if I keep adding to my rack.

Actually, those are low size drives. Maybe like 15TB worth there, so yeah, I'm FAR from that point.

I suppose with consumer hardware it would be achievable though.

10x 4U 24 bay enclosures

That's 240 3TB drives, so 720TB of raw data... hmm ok, so it's NOT achievable (with those enclosures, at least). I'm not even considering the fact that it's actually 670 real TB, then there's raid. You want a bunch of separate raid 6 volumes with a few hot spares, so you're looking at maybe 600TB.

Damn, so yeah 1PT in a single 42U rack is quite impressive. Looks like they have 360 3TB drives, and their enclosures look like they hold 45 drives. Guess they're just designed more space efficiently.

The power usage of 7kw is not too bad either, that whole rack can run off a 40 amp 240v outlet. My rack takes about 1kw lol. (I never leave all that stuff on)

Considering we paid over 60k for a 5TB SAN, the price they are asking is not all that abnormal either. I should make a business case for them to buy one. They seem to be buying a new SAN every year, why keep doing that when you can buy a SAN that will last like 15 years? lol. Imagine all the VMs you could host on there.

 

[LarryRAguilar]

Nice rack! Perfect place for it too, in a nice cool basement. What's crazy is now you can get 12TB in a 1U Enclosure including the Server or NAS. Impossible to keep up with technology!

 

[jvroig]

Very impressive, Red Squirrel! What do you use that for? Also, I am not completely sure if you meant that was your "personal rack" (seems like it, basement and all), or if you merely mean "my rack" as in "a critical business/company asset that I am responsible for".

 

[Red Squirrel]

Actually the 4 bottom SAN enclosures were basically headed to the garbage so I managed to snag them. Given the age and the fact that it's proprietary (can't pop my own drives in it) I only use it for low risk stuff like backups... on top of my existing solution.

The middle server is actually most of my environment. Have like 5 VMs on there from torrents VMs dedicated to my game server dev/test environment. The server has 3.7TB of storage. The top server is a firewall and then the switches are on the back. Mostly all personal stuff. I would love to host services given I have the physical room, but with 5mbps down and 512k up, it would kinda suck.

So it's mostly just hobby stuff. The SAN is fiber channel too. It's kinda neat as it's hooked up to a HBA on that little 1U server that's just above and the OS sees all the drives. I only have the top enclosure allocated right now. I turn it on maybe once a month to run a full backup of my main server. I was writing an article on mdadm raid the other day so decided to use one of the bottom enclosures and all the drives started failing lol. This was actually hosting a corporate environment at one point. They got rid of it just in time.

It looks pretty with all the blinking lights though.

 

[Puppies04]

you can get a faster sequential r/w with HDDs than SSDs if you're limited by price

You mind explaining this one to me?

 

[Voo]

You mind explaining this one to me?

Think about how many HDDs you can RAID together for the price of one of the larger SSDs. Granted, not as much as one used to, but since you basically need only about 3 modern HDDs (~150mb r/w a piece) to beat the fastest SSDs in terms of sequential r/w it's not that hard.

 

[Nothinman]

Think about how many HDDs you can RAID together for the price of one of the larger SSDs. Granted, not as much as one used to, but since you basically need only about 3 modern HDDs (~150mb r/w a piece) to beat the fastest SSDs in terms of sequential r/w it's not that hard.

The key word being sequential though, you'll never match an SSD in seek times.

 

[Voo]

The key word being sequential though, you'll never match an SSD in seek times.

Obviously - but then there are situations where that's all I need. I really don't need fast random access for storing movies, pictures (I'm sure nitpickers can find some edgecases though) or my backups.

 

[Nothinman]

Obviously - but then there are situations where that's all I need. I really don't need fast random access for storing movies, pictures (I'm sure nitpickers can find some edgecases though) or my backups.

Yea, those are good cases where seek time isn't a big deal, but the filesystem cache and readahead usually make up for any issues there. Most people want SSDs for the snappiness and bootup speed which are both highly dependent on seek times.

 

[Puppies04]

Think about how many HDDs you can RAID together for the price of one of the larger SSDs. Granted, not as much as one used to, but since you basically need only about 3 modern HDDs (~150mb r/w a piece) to beat the fastest SSDs in terms of sequential r/w it's not that hard.

I see your point. I am using my SSD for my OS though and as i could happily accomplish this on a 60gb model I think you would struggle to put together 3 HDD's in a raid setup for the £60 a SSD costs.

I suppose it comes down to personal requirements though, we are a long way off 99.9% of people being able to afford TB's of SSD storage

 

[exdeath]

Think about how many HDDs you can RAID together for the price of one of the larger SSDs. Granted, not as much as one used to, but since you basically need only about 3 modern HDDs (~150mb r/w a piece) to beat the fastest SSDs in terms of sequential r/w it's not that hard.

3 HDD under best case scenario to match 1 SSD.

What about... 3 SSDs?

Might not need high speeds to view movies and such once they are ON the drive... how about the 15 days it will take to initially fill the volume or back it up?

Sorry, I'm just bitter and have a deep hatred for our crappy storage technology. While I'm fully converted to SSD at home (2,000 MB/sec 4x RAID0 and even with a 120 MB/sec USB 3 thumb drive I refuse to even touch an optical disc anymore). I deal with a lot of data and data recovery on the job (100+ GB) on spindle drives on a daily basis on systems I have no control over. Over half my day is sometimes is waiting... waiting... waiting... hourglasses, progress bars, more hour glasses... 190 minutes remaining... For a species priding itself on advanced technology, we sure have primitive data storage and retrieval methods. Why the hell are we still measuring things in "megabytes per second" and in some cases "kilobytes per second", is this not the 21st century? /puke

Bring back the magnetic core memory paradigm of non volatile RAM and eliminate the third tier data storage device, or our technology will never go to the next level. Things like AI and computer vision are certainly not happening if we can't read and write gigabytes of data in the blink of an eye. Filthy ancient spinning garbage needs to die.