IBM Working On Massive New Data Drive System [IBM's New Data Storage System Is Measured In Petabytes, Requires Multiple Hard Drives To Accomplish]

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Ever sit around staring at your one or two terabyte hard drive and think, man, if only there were some decently-sized storage systems out there? Well, if you’re finding yourself lamenting the meager state of terabyte storage we’ve got now, you’ll be absolutely delighted to know that IBM is working on that, and their current solution is up in the petabyte range.

A petabyte, just for reference, is 1024 terabytes. Assuming that your standard DVD takes up around five gigabytes (it takes less than that, but this is just for simplification), you’re talking about just over 200,000 DVDs worth of storage. And IBM’s data storage system offers up a whopping 120 petabytes in storage space.

You’re probably wondering just how IBM managed to pull this off, and it turns out the answer is more brute force than anything else. IBM took a series of drives and aligned them in horizontal drawers, like most data centers already do, but then widened the spaces to allow for more disks in smaller spaces, letting them get more disks overall into the system.

They also put in a new kind of data backup system, where dying drives send out their data to other drives, which in turn replicate and store the data until the dying drive can be replaced to take back the data from the dead drive. And a file reading system called GPFS spreads parts of files over different drives, which improves read speeds.

The clearest application for something like this is cloud computing, and considering the size of this cloud it will be sufficiently viable to store and allow streaming on most anything out there. Nothing will be out of range here, from movies to music to most anything you can think of: a system like this has sufficient storage to hold the Library of Congress (averaging about 20 terabytes by some reckoning) about a few thousand times over.

So what do you guys think of this? Wondering when IBM will get one of these to your desktop? Or is this actually the first time you’ve seen overkill in hard drive sizes? Either way, let us know what you think down in the comments section.

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