back to article IBM packs 'em in vertically

IBM is achieving Copan-like packing densities with the 60-drive DCS9900 disk shelf. The DCS9900 drive box is designed for high-performance, streaming I/O and packs its drives in vertically, in 12 front-to-back rows of five drives. These are organised into ten-packs, meaning in the SATA drive case, eight drives plus two parity …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    ...mmmm....toasty...

    Obviously, there are no thermal considerations of running these fully loaded. None whatsoever. Nothing even remotely warm here, move along.

    In their defence, at least the drives themselves will generate reasonably even thermal load; no more ahead-of-the-MTBF-curve "top-slot failures" as you'd get in a conventional vertical stack.

    The internal airflow & insulation is gonna have be stunning to stop the devices in the U's above getting it in the soon-to-be-very-warm shorts, mind. And I doubt it, if the pics are anything to go by.

    Flames...well, it's obvious innit.

  2. Captain Save-a-ho
    Troll

    Perfect example for never trusting a vendor

    The contention that a rackful of DCS-9900 can provide 1.2PB of storage is EXTREMELY misleading, as that assumes either a RAID 0 or JBOD configuration. Based on the 2TB drives and a RAID 6 configuration for each 10 pack, the actual, usable storage works out to only 960TB. This also assumes a 42-RU rack would be used, fitting 10 of these things in with precious little space available for airflow.

    Does 960TB really sound that much less impressive than 1.2PB? It's not like they're trying to sell these things to sheeple the world over, though I suppose that's a bit of optimism on my part to assume no sheeple work in IT.

    1. rnooo
      Thumb Down

      My mum could have been misleaded!

      If the person buying the hardware, get mislead my raw spec, I would be very worry for the company paying this guy!

  3. David 14
    Alert

    IBM Following SUN on this one???

    For those that are familiar with the SUN product line... there was a server that was code-named "thumper" several years ago that also have the storage mounted vertically... 48 1TB SATA drives in a 4-U enclosure. The current version is an Oracle SUN X4540... and that server is a full server with 2 x 6-core AMD processors, etc.

    A similar frame of 48 vertical drives is also available from Oracle as a SUN J4500 storage array system.

    This is not a "new" thing to do... just new for IBM, and maybe newsworthy for the extra 12 drives?

    1. Perry 1
      FAIL

      Not Sun

      DataDirect Networks has made that box a long time. It appears IBM OEM's it and just puts a new faceplate on it.

      http://www.datadirectnet.com/9900

      Note the name, and the disk orientation, and the brackets.

      To the poster above, no it doesn't have cooling problems. We have about 700T of this stuff and it's great & cheap (from DDN, i'm sure IBM adds some manuals and a few zeros to the price).

  4. David Halko
    Thumb Up

    This looks like a...

    This looks like a copy-cat move by IBM to compete with the Sun Storage X4540.

    http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x64/031210.htm

    It may be made by someone else, but it is clear that IBM feels they need to compete in this area, for some reason.

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