At 20c a GB they are around $3K a drive or that notional server with 48 drives is $144,000. As they have called it enterprise it is more likely $5K and $240,000 per server and that 42u rack will cost $9.6m. Or about the same as Donald Trump spends on his hair, but slightly more useful.
I would expect these to cost closer $1.00/GB, due to "enterprise" and the fact that nothing comes close to the data density, write capacity, and functional use of these drives.
Which is over $15,000 per drive. The total cost of 48 drives would be 750,000.
I strongly doubt it being that it's TLC / 3D, although Samsung may scalp for a bit since they are the only game on the block with this type of drive with storage capacities but as soon as other companies join in on the fun you'll see these for somewhere in the middle of .25 and .60
I'm not so sure I would want to deploy a 1U server with that much SSD packed into it. Someone is liable to simply walk out the door with it. 2 weeks later, 48 drives appear on craigslist.
Another good reason for me to test them for Anandtech.
No robberies in my neighborhood. I have three vicious dogs and guns in every room -- it's a requirement for living in Texas. :) And then there's that thousand yard dash needed to get off my property.
As Kristian notes, I think you're seriously underestimating the security that the sort of org who would be looking at this sort of storage.
In my last place of work, the DC was shortly due to be fenced off from the public, but already had ram-proof pillars at the loading bay and front door, and had multiple heavy duty, heavily magnet-locked doors (with their own redundant power) that were access controlled by keycards configured from a single computer in the main office (behind several other of the same doors). The DC is remotely monitored 24hrs a day over CCTV and the security turnaround time in the past has been minutes, with notifications within seconds of *any* alarm incident. The building cannot be left empty unless all alarms, locks etc are enabled upon threat of gross misconduct - IE you accidentally leave an internal door jammed open and are the last person to leave the building, you could turn up the next day to find the contents of your desk waiting for you in reception. But you'd have to buzz in because your access codes would be dumped...
That computer with the access codes has boot password, encrypted HDD, login password for the (heavily restricted) user account, no internet access, and password for the RFID controller software.
This wasn't some bluechip - it was a small-ish hosting company turning over less than ten million dollars a year.
Now they owned this DC, but they also had floorspace in a 'commercial' DC for geographical segretation, which had similar restrictions, and also had 24hr security personnel.
On top of this, all the servers were tightly monitored - a core storage server going down would raise half a dozen people within seconds, most of whom live within five minutes drive of the DC itself.
When you start to get to *needing* that level of storage, you tend to start protecting that data very, very seriously. I'm pretty sure Kristian (above) knows the sort of thing that I mean.
And if you know an org that has that level of storage, and doesn't have the sort of security listed above, do NOT use them - because they don't have a fucking clue what they're doing.
You posess most of the basic knowledge necessary to plan the heist of your old place then. First step of casing a target would be finding out who works there. If the keycard and any actual keys are on the same person and that gets you all the way to the target area, you're a roll of duct tape away from bypassing most security (especially if it's an employee with access outside business hours). CCTV is not a problem, a burglar would assume it's there. As in anything, knowledge is key.
Pfft, I was dismissed in a manner that is best described as legally dubious *at best* and morally, utterly repugnant. I have no interest in giving them any kind of attention, theft or not.
Handily, people who work there now realise that the management are shonky as hell (many other people have been 'disappeared' too) and most of their staff are currently looking at their options now that they are aware of just how tenuous their positions are thanks to the management having no idea how employment law works and not being afraid to exploit it aggressively.
They'll go down due to inability to hire talent - as the people who have left recently have large social media followings, locally - *long* before they need to worry about thefts.
This applies to basically any corporation. You can always kidnap an executive and get him/her to spill out some valuable company secrets. The question is are you willing to risk life in prison for something that's very, very difficult to sell. That's right, you can't just sell 15TB SSDs on Craigslist. The companies buying these drives are fairly limited in number, and they most certainly won't buy them from a trunk of a truck.
Besides, this drive isn't even that expensive compared to many other items data centers house (CPUs, network switches etc).
A high end security consultant asked me what the best way to break into a corporate network was, many years ago. I suggested war-driving, botnets, port scanning, etc. Nope.
Grab the security guard who is paid minimum wage, and break each of his fingers till he gives up his access, then launch an attack from *inside* the network based on his privileges.
Your hardware can be impenetrable. Wetware rarely is.
Badge into gate to access parking lot. Walk into building and badge to open tube. Once inside glass tube use hand scanner to get it to open the other side. The whole time security is looking at you making sure your face matches the picture they have on file that pops up when you badged in. Now we are in the office area. To get to a colo you have to badge and hand scan once more. Federal government servers? Those are locked inside a cage inside that room which requires one more badge entry. Stealing drives? Sure I could. I'd also be caught soon after and tossed in jail. All my security clearances revoked and never work in the industry again. also doubt I could sell these at the local flea market for anything close to their worth so whats the damn point? Even if the drive is $5,000 retail their limited usage scenarios would make them damn near useless unless you know someone selling to a government that shouldn't have them.
"There was a time when SCSI drives were in this price range."
well, "While it’s hard to put an exact price on a single drive, it would’ve cost somewhere in the region of $50,000 to $100,000 in 1989 — or about twice that, in today’s money. That’s around $50,000 per gigabyte — or one million times more expensive than today’s hard disk drives, which are currently priced at around five cents per gig."
Seriously. When I was in HS I did a pilot program where they were (attempting) to teach the CCNA to juniors/seniors in high schools. During said program, I had the opportunity to visit the datacenter for one of Oracle's main sites. Needless to say, security was top notch (considering they had over 100 million dollars of equipment in there, kind of "to be expected").
IMO the coolest thing was the fire suppression system. Basically if a fire was detected, it would sound a klaxon, you had something like 10 or 15 seconds to exit the room, otherwise you were trapped inside, and it would suck all the oxygen out and replace it with some sort of inert gas (argon maybe?).
The second coolest thing was the backup generators. Basically it was 2x Chevy 350 V8's that could be fired up in a power outage to power the entire building indefinitely (provided they had enough fuel of course).
By the time that the prices trickle down to where an SMB (who may have a poorly secured comms room) can justify the cost of them, they won't be worth stealing for profit ;-)
I was thinking the same thing. HP SE316's and DL360's housed 8 max if I remember right. Just to get 25 bays you had to order a SE326 or a DL380. 48? Need external storage arrays for that.
Eventually this will start to trickle down - and I think the price/capacity sweet spot is going to be the 4-8TB drive. A three set of those in RAID5 would be nearly ideal.
Most datacentres still run SAS and other 'existing' storage connections; it makes absolute sense to market this at them, as they can increase their data density by a factor of seven just by swapping the disks out.
I know of at least one outfit who would snap these up even if they were 20% more expensive per GB than normal SSDs just because of the raw power savings - they could turn off several *entire* racks, or repurpose those racks for compute, rather than storage.
I'm not arguing about why they did it (as you say, legacy buy-in can be a tremendous motivating force when it comes to new hardware), only that they did it.
I dare say it'll turn up on a PCI-E controller of some sort soon - but the existing market is definitely a better place to gauge demand for these IMHO.
It sounds like it'll be crazy expensive but even being an enterprise sas drive will probably sell well under 5k. I mean 1TB consumer drives are already $200 on sale, and Samsung can definitely leverage economies of scale manufacturing the entire thing in house.
EMC have just launched a all flash VMAX which scales to for cabs and 1920 SSD drives, about 4 PB of storage so i would imagine they might find a customer or two.
The main issue of that much density in a storage system is having controllers (storage not disk) that can deal with the throughput of that much data and uplinks fat enough to feed it to the hungry servers, a couple of 16Gb FC links probably wont cut it.
Suspect, with 32 packages of NAND + SAS, the performance is bound by 1) the interface and 2) heat. Probably doesn't matter; guessing the target audience wants configurations they just can't cram into a single box otherwise, so they aren't going to cross-shop against, say, the Intel PCI SSDs. (That is, their comparison point is "rewriting the app as a distributed system," not "using more SSDs.")
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44 Comments
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CaedenV - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
So... when is Anandtech going to do a giveaway with one of these? lolSeriously though, I think I need to sell my kidneys to get one of these...
nathanddrews - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Agreed. What are kidneys worth nowadays?lilmoe - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Not much, apparently....StevoLincolnite - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
China has made them as cheap-as-chips.ddriver - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
I doubt you have enough organs to afford this SSDRealBeast - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Probably no giveaway, but I volunteer to test 8 of them on my spare Adaptec 8805 controller. Just PM with with the tracking number of the shipment. :)Laxaa - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
The only drive you'll ever need.lorribot - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
At 20c a GB they are around $3K a drive or that notional server with 48 drives is $144,000. As they have called it enterprise it is more likely $5K and $240,000 per server and that 42u rack will cost $9.6m.Or about the same as Donald Trump spends on his hair, but slightly more useful.
MrSpadge - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
... waiting for the comments of people asking for this to be sold under 200$.descendency - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
I would expect these to cost closer $1.00/GB, due to "enterprise" and the fact that nothing comes close to the data density, write capacity, and functional use of these drives.Which is over $15,000 per drive. The total cost of 48 drives would be 750,000.
Flunk - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Still a great deal.jasonelmore - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
so your just guessing and trying to correct someone on a complete guess. where can i find more of your work?Samus - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
Current enterprise drives sell around 60 cents a gigabyte. Samsung isn't going to have much luck selling a drive for nearly double that.chrnochime - Sunday, March 6, 2016 - link
LOL. Try $2.5/GB:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9S...
Levish - Tuesday, March 15, 2016 - link
I strongly doubt it being that it's TLC / 3D, although Samsung may scalp for a bit since they are the only game on the block with this type of drive with storage capacities but as soon as other companies join in on the fun you'll see these for somewhere in the middle of .25 and .60Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
I'm not so sure I would want to deploy a 1U server with that much SSD packed into it. Someone is liable to simply walk out the door with it. 2 weeks later, 48 drives appear on craigslist.Kristian Vättö - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Data centers aren't like your local Starbucks where you can just walk in and out.euler007 - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
That's still worth a lot more than the cash that most bank keep on hand. Security would need to stand up to motivated, equipped, informed robbers.RealBeast - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Another good reason for me to test them for Anandtech.No robberies in my neighborhood. I have three vicious dogs and guns in every room -- it's a requirement for living in Texas. :) And then there's that thousand yard dash needed to get off my property.
Beany2013 - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
As Kristian notes, I think you're seriously underestimating the security that the sort of org who would be looking at this sort of storage.In my last place of work, the DC was shortly due to be fenced off from the public, but already had ram-proof pillars at the loading bay and front door, and had multiple heavy duty, heavily magnet-locked doors (with their own redundant power) that were access controlled by keycards configured from a single computer in the main office (behind several other of the same doors). The DC is remotely monitored 24hrs a day over CCTV and the security turnaround time in the past has been minutes, with notifications within seconds of *any* alarm incident. The building cannot be left empty unless all alarms, locks etc are enabled upon threat of gross misconduct - IE you accidentally leave an internal door jammed open and are the last person to leave the building, you could turn up the next day to find the contents of your desk waiting for you in reception. But you'd have to buzz in because your access codes would be dumped...
That computer with the access codes has boot password, encrypted HDD, login password for the (heavily restricted) user account, no internet access, and password for the RFID controller software.
This wasn't some bluechip - it was a small-ish hosting company turning over less than ten million dollars a year.
Now they owned this DC, but they also had floorspace in a 'commercial' DC for geographical segretation, which had similar restrictions, and also had 24hr security personnel.
On top of this, all the servers were tightly monitored - a core storage server going down would raise half a dozen people within seconds, most of whom live within five minutes drive of the DC itself.
When you start to get to *needing* that level of storage, you tend to start protecting that data very, very seriously. I'm pretty sure Kristian (above) knows the sort of thing that I mean.
And if you know an org that has that level of storage, and doesn't have the sort of security listed above, do NOT use them - because they don't have a fucking clue what they're doing.
lorribot - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
Personally I would take out the delivery driver, far simpler and the kit isn't second hand.euler007 - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
You posess most of the basic knowledge necessary to plan the heist of your old place then. First step of casing a target would be finding out who works there. If the keycard and any actual keys are on the same person and that gets you all the way to the target area, you're a roll of duct tape away from bypassing most security (especially if it's an employee with access outside business hours). CCTV is not a problem, a burglar would assume it's there. As in anything, knowledge is key.Beany2013 - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
Pfft, I was dismissed in a manner that is best described as legally dubious *at best* and morally, utterly repugnant. I have no interest in giving them any kind of attention, theft or not.Handily, people who work there now realise that the management are shonky as hell (many other people have been 'disappeared' too) and most of their staff are currently looking at their options now that they are aware of just how tenuous their positions are thanks to the management having no idea how employment law works and not being afraid to exploit it aggressively.
They'll go down due to inability to hire talent - as the people who have left recently have large social media followings, locally - *long* before they need to worry about thefts.
I won't pretend that doesn't please me.
Kristian Vättö - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
This applies to basically any corporation. You can always kidnap an executive and get him/her to spill out some valuable company secrets. The question is are you willing to risk life in prison for something that's very, very difficult to sell. That's right, you can't just sell 15TB SSDs on Craigslist. The companies buying these drives are fairly limited in number, and they most certainly won't buy them from a trunk of a truck.Besides, this drive isn't even that expensive compared to many other items data centers house (CPUs, network switches etc).
Beany2013 - Saturday, March 5, 2016 - link
A high end security consultant asked me what the best way to break into a corporate network was, many years ago. I suggested war-driving, botnets, port scanning, etc. Nope.Grab the security guard who is paid minimum wage, and break each of his fingers till he gives up his access, then launch an attack from *inside* the network based on his privileges.
Your hardware can be impenetrable. Wetware rarely is.
Holliday75 - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
Ours was similar.Badge into gate to access parking lot. Walk into building and badge to open tube. Once inside glass tube use hand scanner to get it to open the other side. The whole time security is looking at you making sure your face matches the picture they have on file that pops up when you badged in. Now we are in the office area. To get to a colo you have to badge and hand scan once more. Federal government servers? Those are locked inside a cage inside that room which requires one more badge entry. Stealing drives? Sure I could. I'd also be caught soon after and tossed in jail. All my security clearances revoked and never work in the industry again. also doubt I could sell these at the local flea market for anything close to their worth so whats the damn point? Even if the drive is $5,000 retail their limited usage scenarios would make them damn near useless unless you know someone selling to a government that shouldn't have them.
hlmcompany - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
That is true, and expensive storage solutions are not new to the datacenter storage world. There was a time when SCSI drives were in this price range.FunBunny2 - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
"There was a time when SCSI drives were in this price range."well, "While it’s hard to put an exact price on a single drive, it would’ve cost somewhere in the region of $50,000 to $100,000 in 1989 — or about twice that, in today’s money. That’s around $50,000 per gigabyte — or one million times more expensive than today’s hard disk drives, which are currently priced at around five cents per gig."
here: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/142911-ibm-3390...
for nearly 2 decades, even IBM uses "commodity" 3.5 drives in their mainframes.
Kutark - Monday, March 14, 2016 - link
Seriously. When I was in HS I did a pilot program where they were (attempting) to teach the CCNA to juniors/seniors in high schools. During said program, I had the opportunity to visit the datacenter for one of Oracle's main sites. Needless to say, security was top notch (considering they had over 100 million dollars of equipment in there, kind of "to be expected").IMO the coolest thing was the fire suppression system. Basically if a fire was detected, it would sound a klaxon, you had something like 10 or 15 seconds to exit the room, otherwise you were trapped inside, and it would suck all the oxygen out and replace it with some sort of inert gas (argon maybe?).
The second coolest thing was the backup generators. Basically it was 2x Chevy 350 V8's that could be fired up in a power outage to power the entire building indefinitely (provided they had enough fuel of course).
dave_id87 - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
1U with 48 bays? impressive. 200k+ server unsecured? equally impressiveBeany2013 - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
By the time that the prices trickle down to where an SMB (who may have a poorly secured comms room) can justify the cost of them, they won't be worth stealing for profit ;-)Holliday75 - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
I was thinking the same thing. HP SE316's and DL360's housed 8 max if I remember right. Just to get 25 bays you had to order a SE326 or a DL380. 48? Need external storage arrays for that.bill.rookard - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Eventually this will start to trickle down - and I think the price/capacity sweet spot is going to be the 4-8TB drive. A three set of those in RAID5 would be nearly ideal.tuxRoller - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
It's too bad they decided to go with SCSI.Beany2013 - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
Most datacentres still run SAS and other 'existing' storage connections; it makes absolute sense to market this at them, as they can increase their data density by a factor of seven just by swapping the disks out.I know of at least one outfit who would snap these up even if they were 20% more expensive per GB than normal SSDs just because of the raw power savings - they could turn off several *entire* racks, or repurpose those racks for compute, rather than storage.
tuxRoller - Sunday, March 6, 2016 - link
I'm not arguing about why they did it (as you say, legacy buy-in can be a tremendous motivating force when it comes to new hardware), only that they did it.Beany2013 - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
I dare say it'll turn up on a PCI-E controller of some sort soon - but the existing market is definitely a better place to gauge demand for these IMHO.Samus - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
It sounds like it'll be crazy expensive but even being an enterprise sas drive will probably sell well under 5k. I mean 1TB consumer drives are already $200 on sale, and Samsung can definitely leverage economies of scale manufacturing the entire thing in house.Jimbo123 - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
It is too expensive for anyone, even the enterprise owners.lorribot - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
EMC have just launched a all flash VMAX which scales to for cabs and 1920 SSD drives, about 4 PB of storage so i would imagine they might find a customer or two.The main issue of that much density in a storage system is having controllers (storage not disk) that can deal with the throughput of that much data and uplinks fat enough to feed it to the hungry servers, a couple of 16Gb FC links probably wont cut it.
Holliday75 - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link
Do 40gb HBA's exist? When I left my previous employer we were deploying 40gb uplinks for a large cloud deployment.ggathagan - Saturday, March 5, 2016 - link
FC HBA's are currently at 32gb. Intel has 40gb converged adapters that support iSCSI, but not FC SAN connectivity.Beany2013 - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
"It is too expensive for anyone, even the enterprise owners."It's *really* not.
Source: A basic familiarity with enterprise IT. Something you clearly don't have.
twotwotwo - Sunday, March 6, 2016 - link
Suspect, with 32 packages of NAND + SAS, the performance is bound by 1) the interface and 2) heat. Probably doesn't matter; guessing the target audience wants configurations they just can't cram into a single box otherwise, so they aren't going to cross-shop against, say, the Intel PCI SSDs. (That is, their comparison point is "rewriting the app as a distributed system," not "using more SSDs.")