Comments on: Big storage on the cheap

Running out of hard drive space? Start-up Capricorn Technologies is offering plans to build low-cost mass storage systems.

[Terry Gay]

Am I Missing Something Here??

Two dollars a gigabyte is cheap? That means a 50 gigabyte drive would cost $100. What am I missing here. Two thousand dollars for one terabyte? A 400GB Hitachi drive from Tigerdirect.com is only $310. Three of those would cost only $930 and provide 1.2 Terabytes of total storage space. Do the math. How is two dollars a megabyte anykind of a good deal?

I'd bet there is software that manages data across multiple smaller drives. If I am missing some key economic factor, or there is some important technical factor that I am ignorant of, I would appreciate an explanation. Regards to everyone.

[Stating]

re: Am I Missing Something

A RAID array requires one drive to be used for parity. Total capacity is always n - 1 drives. So you will need 4 drives to provide a terrabyte, which is what Capricorn describes for their GB 1000. The array also includes a 1 gigahertz CPU, motherboard, memory, chipset, power supply (which is probably also redundant, backplane, cooling fans, etc. Then there's their own product markup to make a few bucks.

http://www.capricorn-tech.com/gb1000.html

[jmaximus9]

You Forgot

Yes you build a one for cheaper, but compared to similar systems for EMC,Iomega, and others it is cheap. There is more to the cost than just the drives, you have the rack mountable case, NIC, power supply, controller, and Mobo + processor. There are consumer models from Kanguru that come in small form factor that are about a grand for 1 terabyte. These are pretty cool systems but not rack mountable.

http://jmaximus.blogspot.com

Media is only part of the system

Raw drive prices are great but that's only part of high-availability storage. Redundancy and the hardware & software to keep things running cost money. The last few years it's become the larger portion of large systems.

Scale it yourself. A single old PC can handle 4-8 drives with minimal creativity. Software RAID gets you redundancy. Hardware RAID would be better for a little more. What about 15-20 drives? Maybe hot-swapping? Warm spares? What about monitoring & notification? Try to provision 20-30 TeraBytes as one volume with zero down time, and without staffing people to chase their tails with sub-par equipment. Eventually, power consumption plays a part. The decisions & cost stack up.

No doubt about it, drive costs are much better. Most companies can get by with these lower cost sytems, but the decisions and answers haven't changed all that much. A high availability array will always cost more/Byte than its individual storage media.

[juchestyle]

Peta-Box is where you hide the camera...

...so they can't see it???

[shadowself]

Partially agree with EMC, etc.

I partially agree with EMC and others that these systems are not for the intensive data users. After looking through Capricorn's specs pushing lots of data onto and retrieving lots of data from these arrays will not be their main use. Unless I missed something they don't support any cutting edge transport technologies such as 10 or 40 Gbps Ethernet, 4 Gbps FibreChannel, or a FibreChannel fabric.

These systems seem to be the next step for hard drive manufacturers to get people off tape. These systems are best used for stuff that is stored and occasionally used, but not for data intensive applications. These systems may replace robotic tape cabinets.

EMC's (and other's) systems are overpriced for very large systems (petabytes) where the hardware/software implementation is done in the 10s - 100s of TB range and then just duplicated for whatever size you want. Unless you have a system that requires extremely high availability and throughput capabilities $20 per GB is insane. For that kind of money in the petabyte range you can afford a completely custom implementation.

With the surge in storage requirements due to SOX and such (and new systems coming down the road which will utilize massive amounts of data) EMC and others will have to drop their prices or people will seriously consider options like this.

the network is the computer

yah whatever.. the storage industry is crazy..
let them go on about their business.. iscsi is
going to rule and centralized storage in some
third world country ram factory is going to be
less.. check out the storeage metatags.. hmmm..
and the Enrons of the world are going to raise
the tide and we will all flee to mexico.. got
sand? got a san? wish I had a sandwich.. I think
salton should to something with tortillas... yah!

[amithatguy]

$2 a gig

I thought at first that it was a bogus price too, but its the package that you're paying for. Like the article states, it breaks down to $.65 a gig and $1.35 for everything else. The everything else is hardware, racks, power sources, the fact that storage is on separate drives, and management software (probably an OS). True, you could rig up some stuff on IDE's or SATA's if you wanted to, but this is from a company, all together, all done for you, along with technical support and someone t ***** at when **** blows up.