4 ms·

Is 500 petabytes really that epic? 1500 tapes? I could probably stuff that in the back of my minivan.

by justonepost 9y ago

jsemrau 9y ago
Great comment for 2017. I would like to see the 1987 version and the 2037 version of it.
- jerf 9y ago
  I recently misplaced one of my 32GB SD Micro cards I was using to have an alternate image for my Raspberry Pi. So I just bought another one for the price of a half-decent lunch. And I did have a flashback to my first hard drive, all 220 glorious megabytes of it, and a great deal more expensive than "a decent lunch", and get a sweet hit of that yeah... I am in the future, aren't I? feeling.
Johnny555 9y ago
To fit 500 petabytes on 1500 tapes, you'd need to put 333TB on a tape. Do any currently available tape formats support that much data on a single tape? Granted, I stopped paying attention to tape drive capacities a while ago, but the upcoming LTO-8 standard will "only" support 13TB/tape, so you'd need 38,000 of them to hold 500 PB. I've seen some higher density announcements in the 200 - 300TB/tape range, but couldn't find any products available. AWS does offer a "Snowmobile" [1] product, that can hold 100PB on disks in a tractor trailer. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-snowmobile-move-exabytes-of-data-to-the-cloud-in-weeks/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-snowmobile-move-exabyte...
zuzun 9y ago
"I have a few qualms with building storage data centers. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by putting 1500 tapes into the back of your minivan and then mounting them locally via curlminivantapefs."
jason_pomerleau 9y ago
What will you tell your customers, exactly, while you go on a road trip with their data? And what happened to the data between the time you load Tape 0001 and Tape 1500? Moving 500PB on a live application is not a trivial task.
ransom1538 9y ago
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

Is 500 petabytes really that epic? 1500 tapes? I could probably stuff that in the back of my minivan.

jsemrau 9y ago

Great comment for 2017. I would like to see the 1987 version and the 2037 version of it.

jerf 9y ago
I recently misplaced one of my 32GB SD Micro cards I was using to have an alternate image for my Raspberry Pi. So I just bought another one for the price of a half-decent lunch. And I did have a flashback to my first hard drive, all 220 glorious megabytes of it, and a great deal more expensive than "a decent lunch", and get a sweet hit of that yeah... I am in the future, aren't I? feeling.

Johnny555 9y ago

To fit 500 petabytes on 1500 tapes, you'd need to put 333TB on a tape. Do any currently available tape formats support that much data on a single tape? Granted, I stopped paying attention to tape drive capacities a while ago, but the upcoming LTO-8 standard will "only" support 13TB/tape, so you'd need 38,000 of them to hold 500 PB. I've seen some higher density announcements in the 200 - 300TB/tape range, but couldn't find any products available. AWS does offer a "Snowmobile" [1] product, that can hold 100PB on disks in a tractor trailer. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-snowmobile-move-exabytes-of-data-to-the-cloud-in-weeks/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-snowmobile-move-exabyte...

zuzun 9y ago

"I have a few qualms with building storage data centers. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by putting 1500 tapes into the back of your minivan and then mounting them locally via curlminivantapefs."

jason_pomerleau 9y ago

What will you tell your customers, exactly, while you go on a road trip with their data? And what happened to the data between the time you load Tape 0001 and Tape 1500? Moving 500PB on a live application is not a trivial task.

ransom1538 9y ago

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981