10 Exabyte Storage System

Cleversafe, a cloud storage software vendor which offers its customers "limitless storage space", says that it has designed a dispersed storage system that exceeds a storage capability of 10 Exabytes (EB), or 1,000 Petabytes (PB).

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The system is based on Cleversafe's Portable Datacenter (PD), which integrates 21 storage and network racks that include 189 storage nodes of 45 x 3 TB drives to offer a total storage capacity of 25,515 TB. The current configuration also includes 35 PDs per site (893,025 TB) and 16 sites total (14,288,400 TB with more than 4.7 million drives total). In total, Cleversafe offers about 13.6 EB of storage.

What could you do with so much storage? The best application scenario today may be data mining. Large scale data mining. “Internet traffic volumes are increasing at a rate of 32 percent globally each year. It’s not unrealistic to think companies looking to mine that data would need to effectively analyze 80 EBs of data per month by 2015,” said Russ Kennedy vice president of Product Strategy, Marketing and Customer Solutions for Cleversafe. Kennedy noted that the company's storage solution is a "foundational enabler to Big Data analytics.” The object-based storage could especially be useful in large-data applicatiosn leveraged by governments and defense agencies.

However, Cleversafe noted that the creation of the Exabyte storage model was a result of Federal government and a telecommunications provider inquiring what it would take to achieve a 10 Exabyte storage system. Kennedy noted that, because of these inquiries, the company knows that there is "definitely interest" in such a product.