CERN, with more than 120,000 disk drives storing in excess of an exabyte of data, is probably Toshiba’s largest end-user customer in Europe. Toshiba has released a video talking about how its drives are used in making Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data available to hundreds of physicists around the world that are looking into how atoms are constructed.
The Toshiba drives are packaged inside a Promise Technology JBOD (just a bunch of drives) chassis and CERN has been a long-term customer, starting with Promise’s 24-bay VTrak 5800 JBOD and Toshiba’s 4 TB Enterprise Capacity drives. Their capacity increased over time to the 18 TB MG09 series of these drives.
When the LHC smashes atoms into each other in collisions, component particles are spun off and detected. The LHC has a 24/7 operation for its collision detectors. As the LHC breaks atoms up into myriad component particles, masses of data is generated – around 1 TB/minute, 60 TB/hour, 1.44 PB/day and 10.1 PB/week.
The data is organized and accessed within CERN’s EOS in-house file system. It currently looks after more than 4,000 Promise JBODs and the aforementioned 120,000-plus drives.
Toshiba is now testing 20 TB MG10 series drives in a Promise 60-bay, 4RU, VTrak 5960 SAS chassis, which has so-called GreenBoost technology. This is based on intelligent power management, which Promise says can deliver “energy savings of up to 30 percent when compared to competing enclosures.”
Promise CMO Alice Chang said: “The energy crisis is now a real challenge to all enterprises, including CERN. The VTrak J5960 offers a well-rounded solution to solve this dilemma, and we are confident that Toshiba’s Enterprise Capacity HDDs, installed and operated in this JBOD, will support CERN’s future need for growing data storage capacity in a reliable and energy-efficient way.”
Rainer Kaese, Senior Manager Business Development, Storage Products Division at Toshiba, said: “We continue to develop higher capacities, up to 30 TB and beyond, as HDDs are and will remain essential for storing the exabytes of data that CERN and the entire world produce in a cost-effective and energy-efficient manner.”
That’s a sideswipe at the idea that SSDs will replace disk drives for mass capacity online data storage.
