I think that the original FB post is a bit misleading. If they're using storage blades, those are designed to connect to external storage arrays. The blade itself would run Windows Storage Server for example, but you wouldn't store your data on that blade. You would hook a 2U SAN array to that blade and that array could hold 12 hotswap bays at 3.5" or 24 bays at 2.5".
"Connecting 12+ disks to a machine isn't difficult -- you get a raid controller with 12+ SATA ports on it, or you use SATA expanders, or a SAS raid controller.
The difficulty is physically fitting 12 3.5 inch drives into 2U; I'm not sure you can turn a 3.5 inch drive vertical with only 2U, and you aren't going to fit 12 drives in 2U without either doing that or buring some disks in the box (making them not hot-removable)." "Connecting 12+ disks to a machine isn't difficult -- you get a raid controller with 12+ SATA ports on it, or you use SATA expanders, or a SAS raid controller.
The difficulty is physically fitting 12 3.5 inch drives into 2U; I'm not sure you can turn a 3.5 inch drive vertical with only 2U, and you aren't going to fit 12 drives in 2U without either doing that or buring some disks in the box (making them not hot-removable)."
As others have mentioned there are many different options to fit 12 1TB drives into 2U. While 3.5 inch drives have to be horizontal to fit in that space, 2.5 inch drives like the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD10TPVT will fit in 2U vertically. You can get a Supermicro S216 based chassis to do up to 24 2.5 inch drives in 2U, along with two 12 port sata raid controllers (like this 3ware 9550SXU-12) to connect them all.
