60 terabytes

I am loking for a ballpark costof a storage system to handle about 60
Terabytes of data. Can someone give me a rough hardware cost of this?

Thanks!

writes:
I am loking for a ballpark costof a storage system to handle about 60
Terabytes of data. Can someone give me a rough hardware cost of this?

One DVD burner, $39.95
14037 blank 4.7GB DVD+R discs @ $0.12 each = $1684.44
Total: $1724.39

If that's not the kind of thing you had in mind, better be more
specific. ;-)

OK, I guess I deserved that. Basically we are about to give birth to a
60 terabyte xml repository that an application needs access to. I
assume a SAN but I am clueless in this area and need to give a very
rough estimate of how much the storage solution will cost.

writes:
OK, I guess I deserved that. Basically we are about to give birth to a
60 terabyte xml repository that an application needs access to.

If it's text xml, the first thing to do is gzip a sample and see how
much storage space you really need. It may compress by as much as 10 to 1.

On 13 Feb 2006 15:37:54 -0800, wrote:

OK, I guess I deserved that. Basically we are about to give birth to a
60 terabyte xml repository that an application needs access to. I
assume a SAN but I am clueless in this area and need to give a very
rough estimate of how much the storage solution will cost.

60TB is alot of space. How many servers will be accessing the data?
One? 20? How do you plan to back it up? What is your data center
real estate availability? Can you afford to yse 146gb drives or are
300gb drives required to meet your density requirements?

There are a lot of variables when talking about so much capacity.
Alot more detail would be good. Explain your (proposed) environment
and someone will surely give you an opinion...

~F

wrote:
OK, I guess I deserved that. Basically we are about to give birth to a
60 terabyte xml repository that an application needs access to. I
assume a SAN but I am clueless in this area and need to give a very
rough estimate of how much the storage solution will cost.

You've got a few questions to answer before you even start to ballpark
the costs. For example, do you plan accessing this data heavily? Or
is it a big archive that you'll occasionally access? If the former,
you'll need something like fibre channel drives. If the latter, then
lower cost SATA drives may be more appropriate. Do you need redundant
controllers? Do you need access from a single host or a bunch?

The ballpark cost is probably going to be somwhere from $100K or $150K
(and that's not just inexpensive - it's likely cheap) to a few million,
depending on your specific requirements. You may want to start
talking to a few sales reps to help them with gathering your
requirements.

.../Ed

In article .com,
wrote:
OK, I guess I deserved that. Basically we are about to give birth to a
60 terabyte xml repository that an application needs access to. I
assume a SAN but I am clueless in this area and need to give a very
rough estimate of how much the storage solution will cost.

The cost per gigabyte is between $0.50/GB for raw SATA disk sold
wholesale, and $25/GB for high-end fiber-channel attached disk arrays
using fast SCSI disks. For SATA disk you can about triple that to go
from the raw disk to disks in enclosures with power supplies. For the
disk arrays, you can quadruple the value, if you want RAID-10
mirroring locally, and remote mirroring to a desaster recovery site.

So the range of $1.50/GB to $100/GB makes the cost of your system
about $90K to $6M. For the high-end solution, you'll need to add SAN,
power and cooling infrastructure, bringing the cost up by another few
million. The huge difference in price reflects a huge range in
capabilities.

Which leads to the real interesting question:
- Can you precompress the data? If Paul 10:1 compression is a good
guess, you are down to 6TB, which can be handled by 12 SATA disks in
a single enclosure, using 2 or 3 PCI-connected SATA RAID cards.
- How many hosts is this storage system attached to? I would be very
surprised if 60TB are being used by a single computer.
- If the number of hosts is greater than one, how will the data be
shared or distributed among hosts?
- What read/write bandwidth do you need? Are accesses random or
sequential (storage systems speed changes by several orders of
magnitude depending on access pattern)?
- How valuable is your data? Do you need it backed up? How are
you going to back up this much data? Does it change frequently?
- How vital is the data to your operation, and do you need continuous
access? If yes, you positively need RAID. With this much data, I
would RAID even if you can afford to lose the data for days at a time,
just to minimize the management cost. If you also need to be tolerant
to site failures, you need remote replication (to a second set of
storage systems in a remote computer center).

Once you have the answers to these questions, the choice of SAN fabric
and storage device is pretty much trivial.

Suggestion: look for a big vendor (typically 2-3 letter names), or a
consultant/system integrator, to give you some advice.

--
The address in the header is invalid for obvious reasons. Please
reconstruct the address from the information below (look for _).
Ralph Becker-Szendy