We got a new toy at work. A SunFire X4500 fileserver. When you look at it at first, it looks like an unassuming rackmount box:
But then you remove the top...
That's fourty eight (48!!) 500GB SATA drives!
That's a total of 24 terabytes of metal. It uses ZFS and after you sacrafice space for redunancy, hot spares, and root disks, you have a solid 16TB of storage to play with.
We're going to be migrating a large amount of data from dozens of individual old Dell servers to this box. It should be interesting to see how reliable it is over the long term. You'd think cooling would be a problem, but there's eight fans in the front of the unit that blast air through gaps between the drives; when I took this photo I had just shut the unit down and the drive was barely warm!
Higher resolutions of the photos and more photos are here, just click "Next" to see them all. :)
Nice pics. We'd love to have
Nice pics. We'd love to have one of these at work but 16TB is somewhat hard to justify. How's the noise level? After setting up a few V445s I can't imagine how much worse this one would be.
I doubt Sun will be far behind with the Hitachi 1TB drives as soon as they finally get released.
Noisy as hell...
You don't want this in the same room people are working. This is definitely a device intended for installation in a dedicated data center.
I do wonder why they used so many small-diameter fans instead of fewer larger ones. I suppose it's so that a single fan failure doesn't cause too much of a temperature rise.