That's really cool! Each year of historical images I estimate at 2.8PB, so it would need to scale quite far to handle multiple years. How would you actually connect all those external drive chassis, is there some kind of chainable SAS or PCIe that can scale arbitrarily far? I consider NVMe-over-fabrics to be cheating and just using multiple machines and calling it one machine, but "one machine" is kinda an arbitrary stunt metric.
It depends on how you think of "one machines". :) You can fit 1PB in 1U without something like NVMe-over-fabrics. So in a 4U unit gives you plenty of room.
We have Zen4c 128 Core with DDR5 now. We might get a 256 Core Zen6c with PCI-E 6.0 and DDR6 by 2026.
I really like these exercise of trying to shrink the amount of server needed, especially those on Web usage. And the mention of Mainframe. Which dont get enough credit for. I did something similar with Netflix 800Gbps's post. [1] Where they could serve every single user with less than 50 Racks by the end of this decade.
Stuff like [0] exists, allowing you to fan out a single server's PCIe to quite a few PCIe JBOD chassis. Considering that SSDs can get you ~1PB in 1U these days, you can get pretty far while still technically sticking with PCIe connectivity rather than NVMeoF.
Is an infiniband switch connected to a bunch of machines that expose NVMe targets really that different from a SAS expander connected to a bunch of JBOD enclosures? Only difference is that the former can scale beyond 256 drives per controller and fill an entire data center. You're still doing all the compute on one machine so I think it still counts.
