* Mike tries his hand at building a small version of MIT Media Lab's storage grid
A few issues ago, I mentioned an interesting experiment taking place at MIT’s Media Lab. The Human Speechome Project aims to better understand early childhood cognitive development. In order to do this, a family has completely wired its house so as to enable the capture of all verbal communication that takes place within it, 24 hours a day.
What makes this interesting from a storage point of view is that all the data captured in this round-the-clock audio and video monitoring is stored at a rate in excess of a terabyte a day. Over the course of the three years of the project, this adds up to… well, a lot of data.
What makes this particularly intriguing for the readers of this column is that, as the Media Lab scales out its grid towards its 1.3-petabyte goal, it is doing so by adding what are essentially off-the-shelf parts. What’s more, this is a 1.3 petabyte storage-area network that requires no switches.
Each node in the grid is comprised of a Hammer-Z storage module from Bell Microproducts (the “Z” in the model name stands for Zetera, the company that provides the fundamental technology to Bell). These are rack-mount devices that come with 2TB of storage, communicate over Ethernet, and sell at a price of $5,500 (that’s the price I saw for one of these from distributor CDW). Anything that builds to more than a petabyte using commonplace parts should be pretty interesting to all of us, so I got a smaller version into the lab for review. Here’s what I’ve seen so far.
The Hammer-Z comes in two flavors, a 1U rack-mount and a desktop model. Mine is the desktop variety, a machine about the size of a 4-slice toaster that comes with four 250GB Seagate drives and lists at $1,300.
Hardware connection is simple: plug it in to a power source, and run an Ethernet cable to the Hammer-Z and your router.
Software installation was also easy. On a fast dual-core machine it took 5 minutes to do the initial installation, including an install of the Z-SAN drivers, the Personal Storage Manager management software, and the Java runtime environment these require. I then spent 5 minutes building each of two 200GB RAID partitions.
My arrays are RAID 10, a combination of Raid 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0 (striping) – admittedly sort of like wearing a belt with suspenders, but after all, this is my data so I want to take good care of it. During the install I was offered a choice of using NTFS (for unshared data) of Zetera’s ZFS for shared environments. I went with ZFS.
After that, it took just over 2 minutes to mount the two partitions. So, after less than 20 minutes of setup time, I had a machine that was ready to go, with the partitions all popping up in My Computer where they were supposed to be. And if I needed further assurance, the Hammer-Z has a funky blue light on the front that shines benignly at you once the machine is ready to go.
So, the initial test – ease of installation, turned out pretty well. I’m migrating data over to the Hammer-Z now. Once I’ve done that, we’ll look just what kind of throughput we can expect for the box.
*** StorageWorld Conference in Long Beach, Calif., takes place next week. This conference differs from many of the others because, rather than being a “vendor love fest” where the vendors spend much of their time preening before their competitors, this gathering is really aimed at IT management and staffers (would you believe it’s actually FREE to IT-ers? It is.)
I’ll be running the SMB storage panel at 3 p.m. on the 20th (not the 21st, as I erroneously mentioned last time), and will sit in on as many analyst face-to-face sessions as time allows. Stop by and say hello – or take your best shot.
