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Costs Associated with the Storage of Terabytes?
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?"
Why is it that 90% of "Ask Slashdot" pieces seem to boil down to "I have no real world experience, and I'm just wondering how I can solve problem X for Y dollars when twenty different vendors all sell solutions for 100 * Y dollars?"?
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Twoflower
sorry for sounding a bit trollish, but the current replies here seem to follow the formula of checking the biggest ide drive on pricewatch and multipying that out to give you a number.
:)
forget all that.
if all you wanted was a pile of ide hard drives, maybe this would be ok, but anybody looking for 50TB of storage is not just looking for some disk to hold the pr0n they downloaded last week. large scale storage systems need to manage multiple host access to high speed (15krpm U3SCSI) drives in flexible raid configurations with maximum redundancy, high speed caching (with GBs of RAM to do it), fiber channel switching, cross platform capability, high end management and monitoring, HSM backup and data migration, offsite vaulting of disaster recovery data, power and air conditioning, and a fat service contract from the vendor. none of the above are going to be found at pricewatch.com.
your best bet is to talk to multiple storage vendors about your needs. call up EMC, Hitachi, IBM, and Fujitsu to start, them let them see each other's numbers. With the amount of money that you are going to spend (and it almost certainly will exceed $10 mil - but maybe not $20), each of these vendors will do backflips to get your business (and EMC is particularly good at junkets - take them for all they're worth
Get a clue man.
Where is your failover?
How are you going to connect this disks together? NFS? Samba? That kind of speed (or lack of) is not an enterprise storage solution.
How do you replace disks as they fail without taking stuff offline?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
...I realize that accepted pricing is well above the price I mentioned. And yes, obviously I left out the maintenance.
The problem is that I find that corporate spending on IT purchases has gotten ridiculous. Let's buy a TEMPEST array! Let's buy something with a Sun nametag because the name sounds good! Let's buy a $2k piece of software for each workstation even though there's a free alternative!
I'm not saying that anyone *provides* something in the price range I was talking about. No one is crazy enough to do so, if companies are willing to pay much, much more. I'm saying that, if you're asking whether it's possible to *build* something like this for the price range I mentioned, off the cuff it doesn't sound so unreasonable.
Yes, a seasoned IT person who works with high-end systems like this will laugh. Why? Because they're used to paying huge amounts of money. Because it's an accepted part of the culture to throw down this much cash. What I want to know is -- how often do people question these basics? How often has someone said "Wait a minute...this is wrong."
Are you telling me that if you were in a third world country without the exorbant amount of funding that we USians enjoy, and someone asked you to put together a 50TB storage system for under $1M, you'd simply say "It can't be done"? No consideration, nothing?
I mean, when I look at the fact that the *case* on, say, a Sun high end system costs more than a whole cluster of workstations, I start to wonder just how much excess is going on here.
Say we take the bare-metal, dirt cheap approach. Grab a bunch of Linux boxes. Throw RAID on them configured so that 1/3 of your data is overhead for reliability, and a 100Mbps Ethernet card in each. The figure used earlier was $1 per gig. Put 6 200 GB drives in each. Throw down $250 for the non-drive cost of each system. You have 800GB of data on each system, 400GB of overhead. That's 63 systems. $16K for the systems, $75K for the drives, and we come in to $91K. I left out switches -- you'd need a couple, but certainly not $9K worth.
You'd need some software work done -- an efficient, hierarchical distributed filesystem. I didn't factor this in, which you could consider not fair, but there may be something like this already, and if not, it's a one time cost for the whole world.
Maybe another few systems up near the head of the array to do caching and speed things up, and you still aren't even up to $150K, and you have failover (at least for each one-drive-in-three) group.
I haven't looked at this -- it might be smarter, since you'd want to do this hierarchically, to have caches existing within the hierarchy, or maybe Gbit Ethernet at the top level of the hierarchy. And obviously, this may not meet your needs. But as for whether it's possible to build something like this for that much money? Sure, I'd say so.
Finally, existing SANS or any sort of network-attached storage are overpriced, no two ways about it. Very, very healthy profit margins there. Sooner or later, someone is going to start underselling the big IT "corporate solution providers" and is going to kill them unless they trim margins by quite a bit.
May we never see th