The image at the right might remind you of good ol’ HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” And if you replace “sociopathic murder man tendancies” with “giant storage array” you’d almost be right by saying it is HAL. Well, and it’s sort of stupid, I guess. This analogy is falling apart.
What you’re looking at is Hitachi’s new “SANRISE Universal Storage Platform” high-end storage system. Not a typo. Now I will try and melt your brain with overwhelming technical details.
Using Hitachi’s “world’s first” virtual disk array system, this device can manage up to 32PB (Petabytes) of external storage. Those of you not in the know about storage will now learn that a petabyte is approximately 10^15 (one quadrillion) bytes, and is quite step up from the terabytes following gigabytes. Got all that? To put it in consumer-ese, 32PB can hold nearly 7 billion MP3s (assuming 5MB per). This would be about 49 million movies, if they are encoded to 700 megabytes. In comparison, imdb.com currently lists a mere 411,447 titles.
Before you go asking “where can I download internet.zip??” realize that initially, the system can only hold 165TB. Oh yeah, and a setup with this “little” storage costs about one million dollars.
Read – Press Release [Hitachi]
