Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Posted April 1, 2019 Share Posted April 1, 2019 Do they have tons of hard drives or tape drives? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adam Froehlich Posted April 1, 2019 Share Posted April 1, 2019 They use a SUN data center in California, with a mirrored backup in Egypt. (https://web.archive.org/web/20090326200212/http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2009-03/sunflash.20090325.1.xml) As of last year, they had 25 petabytes of information (25,000 terabtyes.) As someone who helps manage an offline database of around 250tb of assets, I honestly can't imagine the amount of staff and work that goes into managing a live database that large. Like most data centers, I would assume they're using a huge amount of large hard drive RAIDs in servers. Longevity of drives is probably handled with RAID redundancy and in-depth hardware monitoring to stay ahead of drive failure (BackBlaze actually publishes an interesting report detailing drive performance and failure for their data centers each year: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/) Solid state drives are used as well, but usually only as a small part of the whole that may require higher performance, such as in caches or frequently accessed data. As solid state storage prices fall, we will definitely see them in use more and more (again, Backblaze also has an article about their use of SSDs now and in the future: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hdd-vs-ssd-in-data-centers/) 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adam Froehlich Posted April 1, 2019 Share Posted April 1, 2019 Interestingly, it also seems like tape storage may be on the rise, though more popular for longterm and offline storage: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/industry-perspectives/how-tape-storage-changing-game-data-centers https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/why-the-future-of-data-storage-is-still-magnetic-tape As someone who's too young to have really worked with LTO tape backups, I'm kind of surprised by the speed performance of tapes: "By 2025, tape transfer rates are predicted to be five times faster than HDDs." 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted April 1, 2019 Premium Member Share Posted April 1, 2019 Racks upon racks of hard disks. There's warehouses all over the world which provide storage to places like Amazon, Google and Microsoft for their cloud computing platforms, as well as things like YouTube. P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Tyler Purcell Posted April 1, 2019 Premium Member Share Posted April 1, 2019 I've worked with Iron Mountain to setup solutions here in Hollywood. Where they do have some online storage solutions, the vast majority of storage is done on tapes. There are generally a set of backup's made at different locations across the country. Customers pay X amount for online, nearline or offline storage. If you want the files to be accessed immediately, they generally store on raid arrays. If you want the files to be accessed within a few minutes OR if all you're doing is transferring files, then nearline works fine and it's on tape. Then of course offline storage are generally tapes not located in the robotic tape library at all. So it would take a while to get the media back, but it's safely on tape and this is the lowest cost solution. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Posted April 2, 2019 Author Share Posted April 2, 2019 On 4/1/2019 at 7:55 AM, Adam Froehlich said: Interestingly, it also seems like tape storage may be on the rise, though more popular for longterm and offline storage: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/industry-perspectives/how-tape-storage-changing-game-data-centers https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/why-the-future-of-data-storage-is-still-magnetic-tape As someone who's too young to have really worked with LTO tape backups, I'm kind of surprised by the speed performance of tapes: "By 2025, tape transfer rates are predicted to be five times faster than HDDs." I thought they would be very slow. I remember back in the day Radio Shack used cassette tapes for early computer storage. That is my only experience with tape. I'd like to get into it for my material, but very $$. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Posted April 2, 2019 Author Share Posted April 2, 2019 (edited) 20 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said: I've worked with Iron Mountain to setup solutions here in Hollywood. Where they do have some online storage solutions, the vast majority of storage is done on tapes. There are generally a set of backup's made at different locations across the country. Customers pay X amount for online, nearline or offline storage. If you want the files to be accessed immediately, they generally store on raid arrays. If you want the files to be accessed within a few minutes OR if all you're doing is transferring files, then nearline works fine and it's on tape. Then of course offline storage are generally tapes not located in the robotic tape library at all. So it would take a while to get the media back, but it's safely on tape and this is the lowest cost solution. Never heard of a robotic tape library. I looked it up. Fascinating stuff! Can you imagine if a hacker infected a monster tape library with a virus? What a mess it would be. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+robotic+tape+library ...in the old days the only robotics we had was juke boxes. See 2.20 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=morLkJDxWyg Edited April 2, 2019 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Dunn Posted April 2, 2019 Share Posted April 2, 2019 14 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said: I remember back in the day Radio Shack used cassette tapes for early computer storage. That is my only experience with tape. There's no comparison. LTO-8 tapes hold 30TB and read at 750MBps. They're a million times faster than cassettes at least. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Posted April 2, 2019 Author Share Posted April 2, 2019 I have not had much experience with SDD. I have had lots of HDD and only had 1 fail out of a few dozen HDD's. I have had 3 SDD's and 2 of the 3 failed. I was dead right out of the box. The other failed in a couple days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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