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?"

Comments

forget what you know about ide hard drives

[aderusha]

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 :)

Re:Sounds reasonable

[duffbeer703]

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?