MatrixStore » silly

How Heavy Is A Petabyte?

NPT — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:35:40 +0000

It’s sometimes hard to visualise just how much disk technology has advanced in the last 30 years. There is an excellent graphic on the Gizmodo website which successfully portrays: “How Large is a Petabyte?” leading Mark Coleran (Gridiron Flow fame) to ask “How much does a Petabyte weigh?”

Here is my take on just how heavy 1 Petabyte of disk drives was in 1980 and is today. (Disks only, not taking into account server chassis, racks, power and airco units to support it! UPDATE: also all information, the weights, garnered via internet search and wikipedia ..)

The answer from 1980:

One Petabyte of IBM 3380

And the answer today:

One Petabyte of Western Digital Caviar Green

The View from OM

Disk efficiency, capacity and usability has all increased enormously in the last 3 decades making it more and more feasible to protect/archive content on disk long term. When companies like EMC currently have over 2000 clients storing over 1 Petabyte of content it makes you think that 1 Petabyte is not that large an amount after all.

Object Matrix Storage Team

p.s Used purely marketing figures in the calculations (1kb == 1000bytes) .. obviously using real, tech numbers (1024) we would be looking at more disks. I look forward to the day we can all talk in 1024.

D.I.Y Good or Bad (Short Video)

NPT — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:00:15 +0000

A slightly flippant look at why a D.I.Y approach storage may not always the best idea.

The View from OM:

Hope this whets your appetite as Jon will be publishing a more detailed comparison of the two approaches in the coming weeks.

Tape Bashing!

NPT — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:55:33 +0000

Whilst searching our office ‘Dog Food’ MatrixStore cluster today I came across the rather silly tape bashing images below. When we first started out (back in the day) we used to do an awful lot of tape bashing (it was the fashionable thing to do back in 2003/4!) but find ourselves doing less these days as we are being approached by organisations who want to keep a significant portion of their content alive and are thus looking for a disk based solution.

Green Storage

Don't Panic

Where is that runner?

Tape Cuts

I will not re-open the whole tape vs disk debate here, there are older, wiser and less biased heads out there in the blogosphere (storagemojo.com, drunkendata.com etc) who have written reams on the pros and cons of both technologies.
Cheers from sunny south Wales and have a nice weekend…