Cleversafe claims it has the biggest mouth for objects on the planet, gulping them in at a terabyte a second.

The company is an object storage startup and its 3000 series of appliances can cram in a terabyte's worth of objects but you need a thousand, yes indeed, 1,000, ingest boxes or Accesser 3100 storage router appliances in front if a 10EB storage cloud to do it.

The Accessers read and write objects into the object storage namespace independently and each one sucks in data at a rate of 1GB/sec.

A 10EB storage cloud is not just a Big Data installation; it is an effing gigantic data installation comprising:-

- 16 sites

- 24 portable datacenters per site (384 total)

- 21 racks per portable datacenter (8,064 total)

- 147 storage nodes (Slicestors) per portable datacenter (56,448 total)

- 84 3TB drive per Slicestor (4.7M drives total)

- 1000 Accesser 3100 appliances (1GB/s per appliance, 1TB/s total ingest)

- 96 dsNet Manager 3100 appliances (each manages 100PB of infrastructure)

This is steroidal, pump-up-the-numbers marketing. As if anybody would ever put 4.7 million disk drives in 56,448 Slicestors in 8,060 racks in 16 datacentres. It's hugely impressive - but like a theoretical orgasm for object storage buffs.

A 1TB/sec ingest rate is similar to high-performance computing data ingest rates - DataDirect Network's SFA12ke claims a 20GB/sec file ingest rate per rack - but this isn't an HPC situation, not when spread across 16 sites. It basically seems to take quite a lot of time to ingest and store unstructured information into the Cleversafe object store, as each object needs to have a hash calculated; there's a fair amount of processing involved.

The object storage vendors say their technology is better at storing billions of files across dispersed sites than a traditional file system. When we see one of them doing just that we will all be impressed. Until then it's just modelling and the real thing is always better than a model. ®