Monday, August 29, 2011

My God, That's A Huge Porn Trove

We can compare about hard drive space and archives, but with close to a dozen terabytes of externals, I'm still dwarfed by the nasty set up at IBM. You just know they've got some dirty videos in a little partition there...

The new storrage array is 120 petabytes, which is 120 million gigabytes. For you laymen that's 24 billion MP3s or 1 trillion average files, and it could store 60 copies of the biggest backup of the web - roughly the 150 billion pages that make up the "Internet Archive's WayBack Machine". Boy, reformatting is going to be a bitch.

It is 200,000 traditional hard drives they chained together, operating on a proprietary filing system called GPFS, which spreads a file across multiple drives. Their benchmark for accessing 10 billion files was a blazing fast 43 minutes, four times faster than the previous three-hour record. To keep from losing data if a drive fails, the system will automatically migrate files from the dead drive.

Though it was built for an unnamed client, IBM noted the technology would allow for "detailed weather system simulations, seismic activity monitoring, cloud storage infrastructure" and other data-heavy projects. Like the full filmography of Harry Reams and Seka.

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