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Poster:	andyj	Date:	Jun 13, 2004 10:55pm
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	Re: my shot at massive network storage.

I am the engineer on a remarkably similar project.

Some of the greatest challenges are physical and
mechanical. Moving away from a standard 19" racking
system towards dedicated disk blocks (thermaly coupled to copper bus bars) has increased storage density and ease of maintainance. Power supply requirements are a serious issue too, 60Kw is a lot of power (our system comes in at 34Kw/PB)
and the use of individual fan cooled switched mode PSUs has been replaced in the current design by
a high efficiency 12V DC bus. We are looking at
local hydrogen fuel cells as petanode backup supplies. Internally, we are still considering forced air (open) cooling vs microbore gas cooling. Reliability dictates that the number of fans be minimised.

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Poster:	foundation	Date:	Nov 10, 2004 11:52pm
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	Re: my shot at massive network storage.

sounds like you are going for a more expensive, reliable components model rather than the more google model (if it dies, it doesn't matter because we have multiple copies elsewhere and it was a cheap component anyway)

In the past I've worked for a company that made reliable blade based server systems. Are you running dual DC buses? If so, do you consider the OR circuit a single point of failure?

Re: the fewer fans, if you don't end up going with DC bus power (-48V is telecom standard) you could look at the new fanless more efficient AC power supplies such as the antec phantom or industrial grade equivalents (search for compact pci power supplies)

You've probably looked at all this but I'm procrastinating on my real work at the moment so I'm posting...

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Poster:	angelbassmuffin	Date:	Dec 21, 2005 1:11pm
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	Re: my shot at massive network storage.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm