This had come up in a discussion and I remembered this video from about a year ago. YouTube to the rescue. This is a very well done marketing video for the Hitachi TagmaStore Hewlett Packard StorageWorks XP12000 Disk Array:
A couple of caveats -- units like this are actually three or four identical units running synchronously in parallel. If two go down, one is still up and you are still running at full throughput. If this last unit suffers a catastrophic loss of a couple of disk drives, you are still running but at less throughput -- your data is mirrored onto multiple drives and if one goes out, the data is still on at least two other disks.
Power for these puppies comes from three separate power supplies. To make this even more bulletproof, large datacenters are located at the 'corners' of several power grids so each supply can be fed from a separate source. Ever wonder why the large Google and MSFT datacenters are in such odd locations? BINGO!
The shot was taken very carefully, it penetrated a lateral backplane (power distribution and environment management for that one unit) and the drives from that unit (and the fishtank).
Still, an impressive demonstration and regardless of who makes the hardware, the engineering behind all of this is very impressive.
Very high geekdom indeed!
Posted by DaveH at January 29, 2009 10:05 PM
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