Unboxing a PETABYTE of Storage - HOLY $H!T Ep. 16
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,563 words · ~7 min read
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So, on today's episode of Holy,
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we have Oh, wow. This is really heavy.
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This is I'm fairly certain the most
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expensive thing I have ever unboxed.
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This is the pedibyte project. And what
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is a pedibyte? Well, a pabyte is a thousand
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terabytes. a thousand terabytes of storage.
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I by Power and MSI's new lineup of gaming laptops feature Intel 7th
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generation Core i7 processors. Check them out at the link below.
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So, I guess this is where we start. I mean, what does a pedabyte look like
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physically? Well, we've got one box.
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Then we got two boxes. And actually,
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look at this. There's another box
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inside. I hope I don't break the table.
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Inside all these boxes are 100
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10 terbte Seagate Enterprise
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Heliumfilled drives.
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100 of them. So 100* 10 for those of you who attended the same math school that I
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went to is 800 terb.
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And you'll get that joke a little bit better later. Um, so how do you
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transport 100 hard drives? I was actually
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legitimately curious myself because I've I've never had 100 hard drives delivered
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to me before. The answer is apparently
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via couriers that don't even need labels on the outsides of the boxes. These
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really don't seem like they're doing a lot. I mean, they sprinkled some peanuts
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on there. Good job. If it's broken, I'll
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forgive them.
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You know what? I am just going all like
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Tarzan on this thing. There we go.
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I mean, the thing about hard drives is you you pick up one of them off the
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table, they don't really seem that heavy. We pick up 20 of them. They start
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to get pretty heavy pretty fast.
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So, we actually probably have to get like
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each of these boxes open.
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Now, how did they end up with this random mish mash of packing materials?
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Let's see how many different types of packing material we can find. 1 2 3 4 5
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6 7 8 9 10
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ah uh uh 10 packing materials.
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Okay, see this one all has the same packing material in it.
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So, here it is. This
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is what's inside.
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More packing material.
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I mean, they're hard drives. They're kind of fragile. This all makes sense.
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But here we go.
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Oh, yes. So, I guess now then is a good
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opportunity to talk about what drives we're using. These are Seagates
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Enterprise Capacity V6 heliumfilled
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drives and we're using them for a number of reasons. So number one is these are
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in the same series of drives as what we've used in the past in both our vault
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as well as our offsite backup server but
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with some technological advancements. So, since we built the original
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long-term archive vault, Newton Server,
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Seagate has gone from 6 terabytes to 10 terabytes on their maximum capacity
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drive. And number two is that thanks to their heliumfilled enclosures, they are
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more efficient than ever before.
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There's also a degree of trust that comes with a choice like this. and using
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something that has served us incredibly well in now both the vault and our
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off-site backup uh was a fairly easy decision to make. But of course, a bunch
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of drives is just a bunch of drives until you actually put it into a
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machine. So here representing the Storinator that
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I will actually be using since it's upgraded with a better drive mounting
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mechanism and LCD and all that good stuff is my old Storinator 45 drive
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edition that I use as like a bench server now. So why we like Storinators?
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Couple of reasons. Number one is they're actually reasonably affordable for like
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machines that can hold anywhere from 45 to 60 drives. Number two is that we have
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found them, again it comes down to stuff we've used in the past, incredibly
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reliable. So instead of having um a SAS
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or SATA expander setup with backplanes,
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they actually directly attach every single drive to the HBA cards in the
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system through dedicated cables. So it
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just means there's less junk to go wrong.
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and and they're in except for one small problem. Lionus, hold on a second. Even
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if this was the 60 drive model and it had an entire additional bank of drives,
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you would still have an entire countertop full of drives over here.
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What's the deal with that? How are you going to actually have one pabyte of storage on the server? Great question.
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So, unfortunately, we love Unrade, but we can't use Unrade for this project
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because right now, Unrade is limited to only one array per system and 30 drives
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per array. So, we had to look beyond that. It looks like what we're going to
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be using is two of the 60 drive models
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each with 50 drives in it give or take and we're going to be using some flavor
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of Linux either CentOS or Ubuntu running
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ZFS. So we're going to divide up all the drives into VDEVs which is a sort of
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software RAID. Then on top of that we're going to be running something called
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Gluster FS. Gluster FS has some really cool advantages. Number one it's free
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and open source. And number two, it allows us to take these multiple servers
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and effectively make them transparent to every other
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computer on the network as one machine.
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Pretty cool. Advantage number two, and this is really neat, is that it has
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native support for SSD tiering. So, I don't have them yet, but
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okay, I can't lift you up to show you where they're going to go. Wow, this is
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heavy. Um, but Seagate is also sending
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two of their 7 plus terabyte PCI Express
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Nitro cards that are going to sit in each of these machines and act as a
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high-speed, high IOPS cache in front of
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the mechanical drives. The only real
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disadvantage of this approach is the usual disadvantage that comes with any
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type of RAID. We are not going to get
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the full one pabyte. It looks like the
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configuration I'm going to use is going to leave us with about 800 terabytes,
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which is like I'm starting to think I'm not even going
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to bother doing this project at all because
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I mean what's what's the point of even continuing at that point? Only 800
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terabytes of storage. Okay, sorry. I regained my composure.
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Um, the last question that some of you probably have about this project, why on
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earth do you guys need a pedabyte of freaking storage? And the answer is
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pretty simple. We archive everything. Uh, should we archive everything? I
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don't know. I'll leave that up to you. But I'm a bit of a data packrat. So, we
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archive absolutely everything. And we recently upgraded to the 8K camera that
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you guys are watching this super sharp, super crisp footage on. So, we have
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filled up our 170 TBTE archive machine.
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We needed to upgrade to something and this looked like a super well relatively
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cost-effective way to handle it and one that allows us to not dramatically
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change our infrastructure. We can expand it in the future by sliding in more
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storage full of drives. They could even have different drives. You just have to
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configure your bricks differently. or
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moving further into the future, we may look at tape archive for anything that
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doesn't sit on the on the hot server, the spinners.
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So there you have it. This is pedabyte project.
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Let me do that differently. This is pedibyte project.
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your devices and use code Linus to save five bucks on your very own ProTek
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toolkit. So, thanks for watching, guys. If you
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just like this video, you know where that button is. But if you liked it, hit the like button, get subscribed. We have
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t-shirts. We have a place where you can buy all this stuff. We've got all that
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linked. We've got our community forum. All that's good stuff. Now that you're
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done doing all those things, you're probably wondering what to watch next. Check out our latest video over on
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Channel Super Fun. Trying to do my outro faster. I realize I'm not helping my
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case right now.