On Jun 12, 2014, at 11:27 AM, Warren Young <war...@etr-usa.com> wrote:

> [*] The absolute XFS filesystem size limit is about 8 million terabytes, 
> which requires about 500 cubic meters of the densest HDDs available today.

I’ve been wondering what 500 TB looks like, so I worked it out.  It requires a 
mere 100 x 6 TB disks for 20% redundancy.

Viewed that way, 500 TB looks a little on the low side.  You can get a 9U 
server chassis[*] with its face almost covered with 50 hot-swap 3.5 inch drive 
trays.  That puts us only one size doubling from being able to achieve a 
max-size array in a single server.

Even if we assume SAS drives, we’re still only about 3 doublings away from 
filling that 9U chassis with a 500 TB array.  RHEL7 will be in production 1 
level support for another 5 years, enough time for those 3 doublings.

I assume we’re climbing out of the doubling doldrums brought on by the Taiwan 
floods by now.  Even if not, we’ve got another *10* years before RHEL 7 leaves 
production level 3 support.

Apparently Red Hat picked this number by doing similar projections, and set it 
fairly conservatively.

What this means is that some of us will be DIYing petabyte scale arrays in a 
single commodity chassis by the time RHEL 8 ships.  I’m not talking about 
high-dollar SAN or Big Iron stuff here; we’ll be making them from commodity 
parts you can buy off NewEgg without a special order.  Wow.


[*] http://goo.gl/IjSdHz

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