This article was published on November 5, 2011

This is what one million dollars in enterprise-level storage looks like


This is what one million dollars in enterprise-level storage looks like

The unfailingly perfect Reddit has delivered once again. Today, on the social bookmarking and argument site, an intrepid user posted a fascinating picture of what a cool million dollars in enterprise level storage looks like, once turned on and at full hum.

You are going to love this. Now, what you are about to feast your eyes on is 100 TB of storage built by the venerable technology giant EMC. One hundred terabytes for a million dollars? That might sound a bit pricey, but think of it like this: not every bit of storage is equal. If you need your data pronto, that cheap hard drive you picked up at Best Buy is not going to be the best solution. According to the poster of the image, a one ‘bpoag,’ this is what the system can do:

This is a 100 terabyte EMC VNX SAN server, capable of holding the patient records of 1.6 million people, and the complete realtime workload of the entire hospital, 24/7/365. Our existing SAN is able to pull record queries in the sub-2ms range. This box will be considerably faster than that.

The IBM P6 servers we have that maintain the database itself are also ridiculously fast. In the time it takes a beam of light to travel from the end of your pinky to the knuckle, it has completed an instruction and is waiting around for another one.

By the time a doctor or a nurse lifts their finger off their mouse button, this transaction has already been handled and is en route back to their workstation.

Admit it, you just had a nerdgasm. Now, the image:

And if you had the money, you would buy one and download a piece of the Internet and then run it locally to save time. One day, my friend, we shall.

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