PetabyteStorage
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Backblaze supports Lion, updates Storage Pod project
A couple of years ago, the folks at cloud backup provider Backblaze made their Backblaze Storage Pod design an open source project. For around US$7900, you could make your own 67 TB RAID 6 array, and combining 15 of the arrays would give you about a petabyte of storage at a cost of around $117,000. Now Backblaze has updated their project for even more storage at a lower cost. In a post on the Backblaze blog, the company has announced version 2.0 of the Storage Pod. It now provides 135 TB of storage for only $7384, making a petabyte of storage a relative bargain at only $56,696. Add in the space and power for the pods for three years, and you're still looking at less than $95,000 per petabyte. Sounds like a fun weekend project, doesn't it? It may be time to put in those racks in my basement and take out a loan... In other Backblaze news, the company has a Lion-compatible update available. Version 1.5.5.402 is downloadable from the Backblaze website now. Competitor Carbonite sent users an email alerting them that a Lion-compatible version of its backup tool is coming soon.
Researcher promises petabyte Hyper-CDs as we struggle to maintain interest
Holographic storage sure has a lot of potential, but so far all those promises have resulted in nothing more than broken dreams. Now we have some new promises, promises that we'll report with due skepticism. Romanian scientist Eugen Pavel is pledging that his company, Storex Technologies, can create a "Hyper" CD-sized disc (120mm diameter, 1.2mm thickness) capable of absorbing a whopping 1,000,000GB. Yes, a petabyte on a disc. This could (in theory) be achieved thanks to the company's expertise in "glass-ceramics compositions as well as read/write mechanics and optics concept(s) applicable to high-density data storage." You know, the ability to fit lots of stuff into small crevasses. Pavel also claims a 5,000 year disc lifetime, which is interesting, because back in 2000 he talked to PC World about another disc that could last 5,000 years -- one that would store a whopping 10TB. There is, apparently, no expiration date on his optimism. Ours, however, is getting a wee bit stale.
Need a few petabytes of Mac storage? Build your own BackBlaze Storage Pod
One of the largest personal iTunes libraries I've ever seen belongs to a client of mine. This client, who was a DJ in the 50's and 60's, has a huge collection of vinyl albums and singles that he painstakingly digitized, cleaned up, and catalogued in iTunes. Needless to say, opening iTunes on his Mac Pro is an exercise in patience. Thinking about his music storage needs, and the huge amount of digital photos and video that my wife are accumulating, got me musing about other ways to do mass storage inexpensively. At this point, I'm probably OK with a DroboPro, but what if I needed petabytes (1 petabyte = 1,024 terabytes = 1,048,576 gigabytes) of storage? Most solutions at this point in time are quite expensive. As of 6 AM PDT this morning, off-site backup vendor BackBlaze has put their solution to mass storage needs, the BackBlaze Storage Pod, out to the world as an open source project. Their solution is a relatively inexpensive box (US$7,867 for 67 TB of storage) made up of off-the-shelf components that can be reproduced and/or improved upon by others who also need huge amounts of cheap storage. See those red boxes in the picture to the right? Each one of those contains 67 TB of RAID 6 storage in a 4U box. For a petabyte of storage, you're going to need to spend about $117,000 on about fifteen of the boxes.
Fujitsu announces ETERNUS8000 Model 2100: 1.3PB array
So that one petabyte Symmetrix DMX-3 array from EMC you bought a few months ago just isn't meeting your storage needs anymore? Well Fujitsu's new ETERNUS8000 Model 2100, with its 1.3PB capacity, may be exactly what you've been looking for. Besides those extra 314,572GB, you also get a system capable of accommodating up to sixteen 3.4GHz processors, 256GB of cache memory, and RAID 6 configuration for ensuring data integrity even if two of the 2,760 500GB Nearline FC drives happen to crap out simultaneously. Other nice features include built-in data encryption, multiple automatic backup options, live capacity updating, and iSCSI support for copying files over a network. Although no price has been announced for this storage behemoth, considering that your DMX-3 set you back over $4 million, we imagine that the Model 2100 will also be priced out of the reach of mere mortals.[Via DailyTech]
