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Costs Associated with the Storage of Terabytes?

Posted by Cliff on from the massive-online-storage-in-$s-per-10e12 dept.

NetworkAttached asks: "I know of a company that has large online storage requirements - on the order of 50TB - for a new data-warehousing oriented application they are developing. I was astonished to hear that the pricing for this storage (disk, frames, management software, etc...) was nearly $20 million dollars. I've tried to research the actual costs myself, but that information seems all but impossible to find online. For those of you out there with real world experience in this area, is $20 million really accurate? What are the set of viable alternatives out there for storage requirements of this size?"

1 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Pricing sounds a little high by speedy1161 · · Score: 5, Informative

    From experience (with EMC - Sun) your price tag sounds a bit on the high side, but not by very much. Considering that EMC storage (after all mission critical data should be stored on EMC/Hitachi/StorageTek, NOT on consumer IDE) costs much more than consumer IDE/SCSI (25 - 75x) and that's only the disks.

    If you're going with EMC, you'll need to put those disks in something, like a frame (cabinet), and for your size, more like 5 cabinets. With that many cabinets, you'll need some sort of SAN switch and associated fibre cables (not cheap). That gets your disks into cabinets and all hooked together.

    You wanted to access the data? Then you'll need EMC fibre channel cards ($15k a pop for the Sun 64bit PCI high end jobs). But you'll more than likely be serving data from a cluster of machines, so count on buying three ($45k) per machine (so each card is on a different I/O board hitting the SAN switch, redundancy)

    Who's going to set this up? For that kind of coin, EMC (or whomever you go with) will more than likely set the thing up and burn it in for you on site. The price probably also includes some kind of maintenance contract with turn around time fitting the criticality of the system.

    Yes, my 'big ass storage' experience may be limited , but I think that 20Million for 50TB installed/supported/tested by a big storage vendor is in the ballpark.

    Good luck.