Yesterday, EMC announced that Isilon clustered storage can now support a single filesystem up to 20PB in size.
When I read the announcement, my first reaction was “That’s a big deal.” Then, as I read more and thought about it, my reaction changed to one of “No, actually, not such a big deal, really.” An hour later, out of the blue it hit me, “Oh, wait — this is a HUGE deal after all.”
I’ll walk you through my thinking in each of the stages and let you decide for yourself.
I don’t know about you, but I still have trouble wrapping my head around the concept of Petabytes — they’re just too big — they’re hard to think about.
Twenty of them in a single filesystem is a big deal all by itself. I’ve got a few customers who have a legitimate business need to 20PB of storage (actually, some of my customers have a legitimate business need for more than 20PB…). There are a lot of ways you can get 20PB of storage, but not a lot of ways to do it in a single filesystem (and despite what some folks will try to tell you, a single global namespace is not at all the same thing as a single filesystem…).
But Isilon gives you more than just 20PB in a single filesystem. It’s a single enterprise-class scale-out storage system for that 20PB. And it’s a system that’s so transparent and simple to manage that a single storage administrator could be responsible for every bit of that 20PB of capacity and not have it take up all of his work hours.
Like I said, it’s a big deal.
So, for a geek like me, the first thing I think when I see something new is how did they make that work?
I wondered how the engineers had accomplished this increase in capacity. What new technological innovation had been brought forth?
The answer is almost disappointingly simple: They’ve replaced the 3TB drives in the NL400 nodes with 4TB drives.
That’s it. Nothing more. It’s just bigger drives.
If you take a step back and look at the big picture it becomes obvious that’s it’s the simplicity that makes the announcement such a big deal.
First, it’s a clear validation of the Isilon architecture that such a small and simple change can have such a big effect.
Let’s look at what a difference this small change can have in the datacenter:
Big Data is more than a trendy marketing phrase. It’s real, it’s here, and both the data and the systems required to support are going to keep getting bigger.