IBM Builds 120-Petabyte Storage Array!

IBM is staffed with some geeks with big aspirations for sure. The gang at IBM has whipped up a little storage array for an unnamed customer that will use it for some unnamed task. The storage array happens to be the largest in all the land at 120 petabytes. That is 120 million gigabytes. Apparently, the storage array is being designed for a new supercomputer installation IBM is working on.

Some applications benefit from a huge amount of storage space. Things like climate modeling, and things having to do with genetic research, weather modeling, and the gas/petroleum industry can benefit from lots of storage. The 120-petabyte array is made up of 200,000 standard HDDs in a single massive pile of storage.

IBM has tweaked the array so that when a disc goes down the data is slowly written back to the new disc to allow the supercomputer to continue operating normally. If you are wondering 120 petabytes could store about 24 billion 5MB MP3's and more video than you could watch. In fact, the massive storage space could store 60 copies of the 150 billion page WayBack Machine.

[via Technology Review]