Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Power Behind Large Data Storage


There is a lot going on inside your Storinator. CPUs are a cyclin', fans are turnin', data is movin', and most importantly, 45 drives are spinnin'! A steady and reliable power source is essential to make all of this happen. In our quest to create a rock-solid industrial strength server, we've spent a lot of time engineering the power system on our Storinator servers. I'm writing this post to share some of our knowledge with you.

Power as a 'Boogeyman'

I'm hoping that this blog post will help demystify the issue of power. Because a lot of system admins don't have access to gear such as clamp meters or oscilloscopes, power can be blamed for a lot of instabilities. Since power is not being measured, however, this is really a 'boogeyman' type explanation. We've spent many, many hours measuring power and looking for those proverbial glitches that are often blamed for system crashes, but we've never been able to see one. Never say never, but when troubleshooting, we've come to believe that with the robust, high-end power supplies that we use, power problems are exceedingly rare.

Specifically, what I want to share with you is typical 'current' vs 'time' plots of the Storinator during start up, steady state and operating (read/write) current draws, and to discuss how our PSU is well suited for keeping your pod up and running, while having extra juice for startups...