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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.