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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?"
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
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.