Not in any 1U system that I know of unless you mean multiple racks. The biggest ATA drives I see on the market today are 200GB. Most 1U systems won't hold more than two of these. That's nowhere near 1TB! Also you're forgetting about doing backups; and I don't know about you, but I get a fuckload more email than 1K/day. Granted, averaged out over the entire population of the earth - what over 99% of don't even have email, it may well be 1k/day/person. Further, you'd want more than one GigE port on these machines just so as to deal with the traffic. And you'll need lots of cage monkeys to run around replacing failed disks. Do the math if the MTBF of one disk is 10,000 hours, what is the MTBF of say 2 spindles (disks) per machines multiplied by 10000 machines? One failure every 5 hours? Hell, that's even assuming MTBF is that high! Have you see: http://www17.tomshardware.com/column/200210141/index.html ? You're probably also discounting the sheer amount of bandwidth required to copy all that data, route it to each of those thousands of 1U nodes, and then analyze it near real time and provide the ability to search through the results. Oh, You'd need several such centers since the worlds data flows aren't centralized. I wonder what the specs are for those nice Echelon centers already in existence.... Likely they're very different from what you propose. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Sat, 4 Jan 2003, Eugen Leitl wrote: <SNIP>

I think you're being very conservative here. You can package several GBytes of memory and about a TByte worth of EIDE RAID drive into a 1U system with dual GBit Ethernet. A single facility with a redundancy pool of spares could contain 10^3..10^4 nodes, running for about a megabuck/year for juice and air conditioning. 10 PByte of nonvolatile storage and ~40 TByte of RAM accessed by dual CPUs could easily run data mining on the entire Earth's population (in reality only a fraction of it which generates traffic will be of interest), especially if they run custom dbase code out of core, and use nonvolatile storage mostly as libraries.

Assuming there are some 100*10^6 users each of them is sending a 1 kByte pure text email/day a single HD drive will hold a day of world's worth of email traffic, uncompressed. Good quality human voice compresses to about 1.5 kByte/s. Above assembly could store about 3 hours of 100 million people jabbering simultanously. You can of course also run voice recognition either in realtime, or do batch processing of selected stuff from the library.

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