So an enclosure is 2,400TB, say 20 isles of 20 enclosures, so nearly a million TB of data, or 1 exabyte.
That's 1GB of data on each of 1 billion people, just for the NSA's Utah datacenter and there's 4 others.
"Metadata only" my ass.
The first direct-access-over-Ethernet Kinetic hard drive is a modified 4TB Seagate Terascale. The Terascale is a nearline 3.5in disk spinning at 5,900RPM. It swaps the SATA or SAS interface connections for two 1Gbps SGMII Ethernet ports to directly attach to the network. The drives repurpose the standard SAS HDD connector. A …
There are a number of 60 drives in 4U of space storage devices available from a range of vendors today that can be fitted with 4TB drives. As such this gives nothing extra in storage space, and given there is no form of RAID then the usable space offered by this system is worse than say a bunch of MD3660f/DCS3700 devices using dynamic disk pools.
Instead of having all those cat5 cables in forest from these NAS boxes to the switch it would be great to have some kind of enclosure or tray with its own switch to slide the disks into and have just one or two network cables per tray.
...then perhaps aggregate the NIC and processor onto the tray and maybe add some kind of RAID logic
...of course that would require a faster processor but that's amortised over the disk bundle
...connect the disks to the tray with a fast interface that's already a standard perhaps and put the disks into caddies so you can hot-swap them
...add some memory too and a general api that's also already a standard
Hmm, what did I just invent?