• PAPPP
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    11 year ago

    I’m somewhat surprised to learn that each Snowmobile unit is only about 100PB in a 45x8x9.6ft highwall shipping container

    Gonna ballpark in stupid units to see how wrong my intuition that that’s not very dense is:

    Assuming dense but not hot new thing spinning rust, 16TB per 34.5 cubic inch standard 3.5" disc.

    (100PB/16TB)*2 (assume at least two spindle redundant) is about 12,000 discs, so about 414,000 cubic inches of just discs without any of the supporting equipment.

    A highwall shipping container is like 5,900,000 cubic inches, so only like 7% of that thing would be discs.

    Or, accommodating a little bit of the support, let’s say it’s just full of those commodity 90-bay 4U storage servers. Those are 19" x 7" x 26.4" (3511.2 cubic inches) for 1440 raw TB each, again 2 spindle redundancy so you’d need about 140 of the things for 100PB, round up to 500,000 cubic inches of those… still less than 9%.

    Yeah, unless I did my math radically wrong, that’s surprisingly not very dense.

    • okawari
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      31 year ago

      Yeah, it really sounds a bit low. I’m not sure what else goes into these containers. I assume there might also be a bunch of portable equipment and cabling that goes into moving the data in and out of the container? Power infrastructure and cooling and what probably takes up quite a bit of space as well.

      https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyirISpUAAA__xV.jpg

      • Kerb
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        11 year ago

        Id assume rhey put in some standard racks on shock absorbers and more redundancy than usual,
        And wired all that up to acentral input.

        Its probably not build to minmax the capacity,
        but to fit the largest usecases.