Reliability challenges for storing exabytes

As we move towards data centers at the exascale, the reliability challenges of such enormous storage systems are daunting. We demonstrate how such systems will suffer substantial annual data loss if only traditional reliability mechanisms are employed. We argue that the architecture for exascale storage systems should incorporate novel mechanisms at or below the object level to address this problem. Our argument for such a research focus is that focusing solely on the device level will not scale, and in this study we analytically evaluate how rapidly this problem manifests.