So, here is pretty… big. At this very moment, researchers at IBM are building the most important data drive ever — a 120 petabyte beast constructed from some 200,000 normal HDDs working in concert. To lay that into perspective, 120 petabytes is the equivalent of 120 million gigabytes, (or sufficient room to hang about 24 billion, average-sized MP3′s), and significantly more spacious than the 15 petabyte capacity present in the most important arrays currently in use. To attain this, IBM aligned individual drives in horizontal drawers, as in most data centers, but made these spaces even wider, with the intention to accommodate more disks within smaller confines. Engineers also implemented a brand new data backup mechanism, whereby information from dying disks is slowly reproduced on a replacement drive, allowing the system to continue running with none slowdown. A system called GPFS, meanwhile, spreads stored files over multiple disks, allowing the machine to read or write different parts of a given file straight away, while indexing its entire collection at breakneck speeds. The corporate developed this actual system for an unnamed client seeking to conduct complex simulations, but Bruce Hillsberg, IBM’s director of storage research, says it can be just a matter of time before all cloud computing systems sport similar architectures. For the instant, however, he admits that his creation remains to be “at the lunatic fringe.”
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