Capricorn releases a 120TB storage system

CAPRICORN TECHNOLOGIES just released a low power, fairly intelligent storage system based on the Via mini-ITX boards. The short story is 3TB per 1U node, 120TB per 19 inch rack.

I first saw these boxes at the Via restaurant last CES, or maybe two CESes ago, either way, I was fairly impressed. What they do it take a low power mini-ITX board running at 1GHz, stuff some RAM in, and then add four hard drives. To get the maximum density, you then slap it all into a 1U case. When you have a wall of drives, things get hot fast, and the less power you use, the less you have to pay for, and to dissipate which is why a Via solution is far better than a Tulsa here.

What Capricorn does with their PetaBox GB3000 is to take 4 750GB drives, and add the lowest power CPU then can get to it. With a full x86 PC on board, you can put enough brains in it to do whatever you want, and run your management software essentially for free. You get all this for about 80W per node, or 3200W per rack.

The next step up is the TB120 PetaBox, basically a rack of 40 GB3000s and an ethernet switch or two. If you need more space than that, I would say it is time to lay off the naughty pictures for a bit and seek serious help.

In any case, Capricorn is saying you can get into one to the TB120s for about $1.50 a GB, and a little math says a full rack would cost under $200K. If you think that is a lot, imagine the Tivo you could make out of one, you could have every reality TV program at your fingertips for a little less than the cost of an average house.

Capricorn looks to have done quite well. It picked out a good, low-power and efficient platform to base its boxes on, and since these are x86 based, it is easy to write for. They are dense, power efficient, and cheap, what more do you need? µ