eRacks' product line now includes both desktops and servers operating with Western Digital's new hard drives.
eRacks Open Source Systems, one of the computer server vendors
utilizing the new 2.5TB and 3TB hot-swappable hard drives manufactured
by Western Digital, announced the release of the eRacks/NAS50 server,
which the company said makes petabyte-level data storage within two
rack cabinets a reality. Four 9U-height eRacks/NAS50 systems can be
housed in a single 42U Cabinet, containing a total of 200 drives or 600
terabytes of data. eRacks manufactures its own line of rackmount
servers and desktops configured with open source operating systems,
such as Linux or OpenBSD.
eRacks' product line now includes both desktops and servers operating
with Western Digital's new hard drives. Home and enterprise users
craving larger capacities for storage can create customized hardware
configurations online, a company release noted, with one 3TB drive able
to handle up to 600,000 10MP digital photos, 750,000 4-minute long 128
kbps songs (MP3), 1,150 hours of DVD-quality video at 2.597 GB/hr, or
360 hours of HD video at 8.3 GB/hr. "Additional drive space allows for
storage-demanding programs and network systems, with plenty of space
left over for backups, database, mathematical model and data
replications," a company release stated.
eRacks' NAS (Network Attached Storage) category of servers is comprised
of rackmount systems especially designed for data storage. The largest
rackmount server, eRacks/NAS50, contains 50 hot-swappable hard drive
bays. These systems are designed to be used by large radio stations and
engineers for data retention, storing uncompressed media files, and
backups.
"We're especially excited to offer our customers the NAS50," said Max
Haskvitz, general manager of eRacks. "The ability to house 150TB in a
single unit is extremely efficient for data warehouses and other
storage-needy applications."
In addition to 150TB of storage, the eRacks/NAS50 holds a maximum of
two hexa-core Intel Xeon or two AMD Opteron CPUs for a total of 12
Intel cores or 24 AMD cores. Memory can be configured to a maximum of
128 GB, and multiple RAID arrays can be configured. eRacks also offers
4GbE and 10GbE network interfaces for the eRacks/NAS50 server. eRacks
also allows an external SAS option to attach multiple NAS50 servers or
other NAS units together to approach a petabyte-level storage.
Swapping a smaller drive for a 3TB drive may require changes in the
partition configuration, a company statement noted. Haskvitz said
on-site technical experts at eRacks would pre-install RAID systems,
partitions and operating systems, and upgrade or repair servers. eRacks
also installs and configures the customer's choice of operating system,
including Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat, Fedora Linux or other Linux
distribution, *BSD or Sun's Open Solaris, as well as additional open
source software.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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