gonkulair

Just before Christmas, I had the pleasure of making another trip to the Geek Squad City in Louisville, KY. We were there for the big NAS install. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. Basically, I giant hard drive that connects to your computer through your network. This is a pivotal piece of our Data Recovery strategy. It allows us data retention, redundancy of hardware and data and also allows us to have more than a single shift of Data Recovery Agents, should we need to scale the volume we’re capable of. We basically started with some empty space in the Data Closet at the city, we then built the cabinets or racks. After that we racked up the hardware and tested it out. There is a total of 40TB (40 Terabytes ~ 40,000 Gigabytes). We’ve affectionately named the installation: “The Terapod”. Partially because it’s shape is similar to that of a giant black iPod and then of course because it’s size is measured in TeraBytes. If it were an iPod, and the average song file was 4MB, the TeraPod would hold roughly 10,000,000 songs. That’s a ton of music. And since the actual weight on the terapod is about 2700lbs, it literally does hold a ton of data. Well, we got everything installed and tested, now it’s just sitting dark waiting for our retail freeze to lift so we can make the necessary network/firewall changes and bring it online for good. Here’s some pics, to give an idea what something like this looks like. The guy in the pictures is my friend/coworker Justin.

In the Full Rack picture you can see 20 distinct units spaced out. Each 10TB of storage uses 1 Head Unit (Server) and 4 Drive Trays. Each drive tray holds 14 x 300GB 10k RPM Fibre Channel Drives. In the end, it’s a total of  56 Drives per 10TB, or 226 Drives for the total 40TB of storage. There is RAID redundancy and hot spares waiting to come online when a drive fails. All of this can happen with a minimal impact on performance and in a very small amount of time. It’s pretty sweet. I’m trying to figure out how to get the $500k to get one for home.