So, on today's episode of Holy,
we have Oh, wow. This is really heavy.
This is I'm fairly certain the most
expensive thing I have ever unboxed.
This is the pedibyte project. And what
is a pedibyte? Well, a pabyte is a thousand
terabytes. a thousand terabytes of storage.
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So, I guess this is where we start. I mean, what does a pedabyte look like
physically? Well, we've got one box.
Then we got two boxes. And actually,
look at this. There's another box
inside. I hope I don't break the table.
Inside all these boxes are 100
10 terbte Seagate Enterprise
Heliumfilled drives.
100 of them. So 100* 10 for those of you who attended the same math school that I
went to is 800 terb.
And you'll get that joke a little bit better later. Um, so how do you
transport 100 hard drives? I was actually
legitimately curious myself because I've I've never had 100 hard drives delivered
to me before. The answer is apparently
via couriers that don't even need labels on the outsides of the boxes. These
really don't seem like they're doing a lot. I mean, they sprinkled some peanuts
on there. Good job. If it's broken, I'll
forgive them.
You know what? I am just going all like
Tarzan on this thing. There we go.
I mean, the thing about hard drives is you you pick up one of them off the
table, they don't really seem that heavy. We pick up 20 of them. They start
to get pretty heavy pretty fast.
So, we actually probably have to get like
each of these boxes open.
Now, how did they end up with this random mish mash of packing materials?
Let's see how many different types of packing material we can find. 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10
ah uh uh 10 packing materials.
Okay, see this one all has the same packing material in it.
So, here it is. This
is what's inside.
More packing material.
I mean, they're hard drives. They're kind of fragile. This all makes sense.
But here we go.
Oh, yes. So, I guess now then is a good
opportunity to talk about what drives we're using. These are Seagates
Enterprise Capacity V6 heliumfilled
drives and we're using them for a number of reasons. So number one is these are
in the same series of drives as what we've used in the past in both our vault
as well as our offsite backup server but
with some technological advancements. So, since we built the original
long-term archive vault, Newton Server,
Seagate has gone from 6 terabytes to 10 terabytes on their maximum capacity
drive. And number two is that thanks to their heliumfilled enclosures, they are
more efficient than ever before.
There's also a degree of trust that comes with a choice like this. and using
something that has served us incredibly well in now both the vault and our
off-site backup uh was a fairly easy decision to make. But of course, a bunch
of drives is just a bunch of drives until you actually put it into a
machine. So here representing the Storinator that
I will actually be using since it's upgraded with a better drive mounting
mechanism and LCD and all that good stuff is my old Storinator 45 drive
edition that I use as like a bench server now. So why we like Storinators?
Couple of reasons. Number one is they're actually reasonably affordable for like
machines that can hold anywhere from 45 to 60 drives. Number two is that we have
found them, again it comes down to stuff we've used in the past, incredibly
reliable. So instead of having um a SAS
or SATA expander setup with backplanes,
they actually directly attach every single drive to the HBA cards in the
system through dedicated cables. So it
just means there's less junk to go wrong.
and and they're in except for one small problem. Lionus, hold on a second. Even
if this was the 60 drive model and it had an entire additional bank of drives,
you would still have an entire countertop full of drives over here.
What's the deal with that? How are you going to actually have one pabyte of storage on the server? Great question.
So, unfortunately, we love Unrade, but we can't use Unrade for this project
because right now, Unrade is limited to only one array per system and 30 drives
per array. So, we had to look beyond that. It looks like what we're going to
be using is two of the 60 drive models
each with 50 drives in it give or take and we're going to be using some flavor
of Linux either CentOS or Ubuntu running
ZFS. So we're going to divide up all the drives into VDEVs which is a sort of
software RAID. Then on top of that we're going to be running something called
Gluster FS. Gluster FS has some really cool advantages. Number one it's free
and open source. And number two, it allows us to take these multiple servers
and effectively make them transparent to every other
computer on the network as one machine.
Pretty cool. Advantage number two, and this is really neat, is that it has
native support for SSD tiering. So, I don't have them yet, but
okay, I can't lift you up to show you where they're going to go. Wow, this is
heavy. Um, but Seagate is also sending
two of their 7 plus terabyte PCI Express
Nitro cards that are going to sit in each of these machines and act as a
high-speed, high IOPS cache in front of
the mechanical drives. The only real
disadvantage of this approach is the usual disadvantage that comes with any
type of RAID. We are not going to get
the full one pabyte. It looks like the
configuration I'm going to use is going to leave us with about 800 terabytes,
which is like I'm starting to think I'm not even going
to bother doing this project at all because
I mean what's what's the point of even continuing at that point? Only 800
terabytes of storage. Okay, sorry. I regained my composure.
Um, the last question that some of you probably have about this project, why on
earth do you guys need a pedabyte of freaking storage? And the answer is
pretty simple. We archive everything. Uh, should we archive everything? I
don't know. I'll leave that up to you. But I'm a bit of a data packrat. So, we
archive absolutely everything. And we recently upgraded to the 8K camera that
you guys are watching this super sharp, super crisp footage on. So, we have
filled up our 170 TBTE archive machine.
We needed to upgrade to something and this looked like a super well relatively
cost-effective way to handle it and one that allows us to not dramatically
change our infrastructure. We can expand it in the future by sliding in more
storage full of drives. They could even have different drives. You just have to
configure your bricks differently. or
moving further into the future, we may look at tape archive for anything that
doesn't sit on the on the hot server, the spinners.
So there you have it. This is pedabyte project.
Let me do that differently. This is pedibyte project.
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Channel Super Fun. Trying to do my outro faster. I realize I'm not helping my
case right now.