Power Consumption in a Very Large Vault Architecture

Our largest single box server architecture is a 24-drive, Quad Processor system with 16GBytes of memory. Fully filled with 1.5TByte Seagate drives, this monster has around 25TBytes of usable high speed storage space. Overall performance is about 500MBytes/second across 6 gigabit Ethernet ports. This server can be directly attached to a tape or Blu-Ray library with SCSI or Fibre Channel interfaces.

With high speed access to an extremely large immediate storage space, and access to hundreds of terabytes of files, the default configuration will store over 1 Billion files, each file up to a terabyte is size, for a total Vault storage space is excess of 1 Zettabyte (thats 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).

The really exciting part about this is the total power consumption for this server. Less than 600 watts typically, as shown in the picture below of a KilloWatt monitor on the power line of a fully configured system running all 24 drives in a mixture of read and write operations. The system is running all power supplies on a single cable in this example, in a normal configuration you would run four redundant power cables.