Is IBM’s record breaking storage cluster the wave of the future?
What we know:
- Location: IBM Research Almaden, CA
- Capacity: 120PB (or 120,000,000GB)
- Storage Component: Hard drive
- # Storage components: 200,000
- File system: IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS)
- # Files stored: 1 Trillion
What we don’t know just yet:
- What IBM is calling it
- Who IBM is building it for
- What hard drive capacity (though Extreme Tech suggests 1TB)
- Where it will be deployed
- When it will be complete
- How it will shape the future of storage
Yes – shape the future of storage. Surely this massive array is being constructed for some entity’s benefit. I doubt IBM is building this thing for the sake of trying. Someone behind the scenes has a use for a 120PB cluster. Extreme Tech suggests a government agency, High Performance Computing (HPC), or a cloud company like Google or Facebook. Someone with a ton of storage capacity demand, and a relentless thirst for data analytics which brings us to yet another example of the storage industry’s most favorite term “Big Data”.
Big Data, though its name might suggest it, is not just about capacity. It’s more about what the data tells us as I talked about here and here. IBM just so happens to be one of the big players in big data with their acquisition of Netezza and if you consider who IBM calls out on their website, it’s safe to say the customer for this 120PB falls in one of the following verticals:
This begs the question, is IBM’s 120PB experiment an indication of what solutions could be expected for this big data movement? Apple alone purchased 12PB supposedly just for their iCloud project. Imagine what the likes of government agencies or analytics junkies like Google might need. I would guess it’s 10x that! Now that’s ironic.
Who do you think wants 120PB of storage in one array?
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