On Building Massive Data Storage Systems...

datazone asks: "I know there are companies that provide data storage solutions, but they are very expensive. Has anyone built anything in the range of 1TB or more of storage? What sort of hardware & software configuration would be used and was it worth it in the long run after taking the time, money and support into consideration?"

Comments

how about asking a question that can be answered?

[ilkahn]

ok, now I am all for giving people advice, however I have got to say that I am quite annoyed at the quality of questions being posted on ask slashdot. This quesiton is by all intents and purposes, unanswerable! I mean, how do you build a 1 TB storage solution? You get 1TB worth of drives... ok, that was rather worthless, don't you think? now tell us, do you want striping, do you want mirroring, do you want redundancy? do you want hot-swappability, do you want the ability to walk up to 1/2 your storage, shoot it, and have the database not go down? Come on, we don't ask much, just give us enough to answer your question, and the great hoards of slashdotters will be happy to assist you! (me included)

what is meant by "expensive"

[dutky]

From a few back-of-the-envelope calculations I can see that a minimal 1TB setup would cost at least $7200, for the drives alone (this is using 18 60GB IDE drives without any kind of redundancy) A more reliable solution would be to use SCSI drives in a RAID configuration, which would need 1.5 times as many drives in order to deliver some redundancy. Now we are looking at 27 drives and 4 SCSI busses, which comes to about $40,000, again just for the drives.

Hmm

[aTRaTiCa]

Rather strange to see a story posted and no "first posts" after a 3 hour+ span...

But ANYWAYS...

It all depends on what setup your seeking. IBM offers many products that may suit your needs. I've used a lot of ibm's storage hardware and believe it's top quality. Check out IBMs storage site and see for yourself. They have many good business solutions. Sun is also a good manufacturer for mass storage. Check out Sun's storage site for more information from them.

I suppose you just want storage space? Or do you want reliability and redundancy? If you do, the price is going to be jacked up, especially for a tall order weighing in at around 1tb. I don't forsee a big IDE+SCSI chasis full off 528 meg drives :-)