Data Storage: Internet Archive Gets a Place in the Sun (Portable Data Center)
By Chris Preimesberger on 2009-03-26 eWeek.com
The Internet Archive, one of the fastest-growing digital libraries in the world, has migrated its massive amount of content into a new Sun Microsystems-built portable data center loaded with 60 Sun X4500 Thumper arrays that each have 48TB of storage capacity. Sun staged a launch event at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters on March 25.
“It's amazing to think that the whole Web collection, which is about 2PB compressed and from 4PB to 5PB uncompressed, can live in a 20-foot-by-8-foot-by-8-foot shipping container, which, from our standpoint, is a computer,” Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, told eWEEK.
The archive, which employs the equivalent of only three system administrators, goes back to 1996 and stores more than 150 billion Web pages, Kahle said. It is accessed 500 times per second. Archive.org also houses the Wayback Machine, 1 million books, 100,000 movies and about 200,000 audio recordings, Kahle said. “It is a full-on library. This technology we see as another step toward a manageable system for dealing with enormous amounts of information safely.”
Phi Beta Iota: Don't miss the eight-shot slide show above. Brewster spoke at OSS '92–we have wasted the past twenty years, he has not. Now imagine this combined with the C Drives of participating members of the Global Game, and all the insurance data, and true cost information overlain on all credit purchases…..
