-
Large SANs – Speed VS Density
-
The question of data growth and timing you bring up is one I think about a lot but is hard to guess. I “need” a good chunk now, something like 60-70TB. Add in 20% for headroom and it’s closer to 80. Our growth rate is hard to guess, but I think we could be at 150TB in 2-3 years. Of course with some smart media management those numbers may come down. Who knows? I think I’d rather plan too big than too small at this point, as our large purchases tend to take 6 months or more to go through, and I’d rather not be caught behind like we are right now.
As for fiber vs ethernet, the SataBeast has both 8GB fiber and 10GB ethernet (their brochure only says 1GB but they’ve updated to 10GB). We’ll probably stick with fiber for the short term but have the option of ethernet long term. Does XSAN work over 10GB ethernet? Haven’t heard anyone talk about this yet…
As for LTO, I have a few reasons I don’t want to mess with it, but the main reason is complexity of keeping it going and lack of staff to deal with it. LTO requires a bit more hand-holding than disk and doesn’t offer significant enough advantage to make it worthwhile.
-
It’s hard to purchase storage now for use 2-3 years down the line because you know prices will come down and technology will advance. Your purchase cycle makes it difficult to wait, though, and there’s always that fear the budget won’t be there next year when you need more storage. If your organization is accepting of medium- to long-term IT planning you may be able to lay out a plan that gets you the capacity you need now and sets up benchmarks to trigger additional storage purchasing in the future. One strategy to consider is getting archive storage now and perhaps the next purchase is a replacement for your current production storage, which can be re-purposed to additional archive capacity. That leaves you the flexibility, and hopefully the budget, to take advantage of new technology in a year or so.
Douglas
—
BreadBox, Inc.
douglas [at] breadboxstorage [dot] com
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up