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World's Five Biggest SANs
An anonymous reader writes "ByteandSwitch is searching the World's Biggest SANs, and has compiled a list of 5 candidate with networks supports 10+ Petabytes of active storage. Leading the list is JPMorgan Chase, which uses a mix of IBM and Sun equipment to deliver 14 Pbytes for 170k employees. Also on the list are the U.S. DoD, which uses 700 Fibre Channel switches, NASA, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (it's got 18 Pbytes of tape! storage), and Lawrence Livermore."
What about Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.?
I work for one of the organisations listed and I have to say that what they described sounds NOTHING like our infrastructure :-)
... somewhere to store all my porn
How bing is the central medical database repository?
Yes, I know, US web site and everything but, seriously, have you checked the data storage of CERN (birth place of the web) lately?
If I remember correctly, these guys will generate petabytes of data per day when that monster particle accelerator goes online in a few months...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
that all the disks are formatted FAT32...
Task Mangler
Finally somewhere to store all my porn
We're talking about Petabytes, not Pedobytes.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
14Pb for 170k employees isn't so much - 83 gigabytes per person.
If you add up the total disk space in an average office you'll get more than that. If I add up all my external disks, etc. I've got more than a terabyte on my desktop.
(And yes it's true, data does grow to fit the available space)
No sig today...
Someone can install a FULL install of Windows Vista!
SAN = Storage area network
...and why does the article say "Pbytes", "Tbytes", etc.
The abbreviated units are "PB" and "TB".
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte
No sig today...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Utter crap. CERN, for instance, is building 15 PB worth of tape storage. The currently have 10PB. And there are organizations on the EB range...
I didn't say the disks were full, just that the storage available per person in the average office is more than that.
Does the whole 14Pb go in a single room? That might be impressive.
No sig today...
My home entertainment server at 3.3TB RAID6 isn't even in the running then?
Bugger.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Let's hope CERN's data can be zipped...if not, they'll be in trouble pretty quickly.
Remember when you got your first copy of Napster and ADSL? That's how serious...!
No sig today...
Kinda like saying the worlds fastestest runner that likes swiss cheese best. This isn't a list of fastest, largest, most used, etc. Just just some PR spin for SANs. Nothing wrong with that, but still.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
At least according to this article.
It's planned to go running next spring, but it's already at 3.5 PB. (The old LEP collider working in the same tunnel produced quite a bit of data too).
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Ah, go on tell us. We won't tell anybody
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Google, the WayBack Machine, to say nothing of the 1.5 million machine bot-net we've been hearing about recently.
From my experience most FTSE 100 companies in the UK have multi-petabytes of storage so I'm assuming that the article is referring to a single consolidated SAN and not disparate SAN islands. Although it is interesting to examine the limits of scalability for such an environment on theorectical grounds, a more interesting question would be to understand the reasons why organisations would want to consolidate such vast quantities of data within a single SAN system.
Surely there are other important considerations such as security, resilience (yes most SANs are dual fabric - but do you not need more if you are putting an entire organisational egg in one basket?) and risk which must be balanced againsts the need to have consolidated access to the entire organisation's storage through a single interconnected SAN?
Each employee is NOT getting 83Gb of space on the SAN. They might get a few Gb for email. That space is used to store accounts, general business stuff, personal information, credit reports, market information, simulations etc primarily for data mining. Then of course it's replicated to several locations.
Deleted
A few years ago, I remember reading an article about the IRS (the government tax division) that had seven or eight regional data centers around the U.S. -- each with many petabytes of storage to store current and historical tax data on hundreds of millions of Americans, corporations, etc. I can't find the article now but it seems like *it* should make the list... maybe even top the list.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
with an unlikely name that offers a scalable,
distributable SAN, called an HDSAN
(High Density Storage Area Network),
for its customers:
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I have no idea how much disk space my firm has, but I did hear an apocryphal tale of installing multiple truckfuls of disks every week pretty much indefinitely (now, of course, older smaller disks are also being removed, but even if it's one for one the service life of enterprise disks means the total is continuously growing). But the firm and the total space can't be disclosed. I'm not trying to make any claims - it could well be smaller than the five mentioned, but the point is nobody knows. I'm sure lots of other firms have very big SANs too.
Because EVERY SINGLE FUCKING story with "TB" and "GB" causes arguments in the way of "this has to be "...bits", the number is too large for bytes" or vice versa even here.
To avoid missunderstandings, 4 additionals bytes (B) dont seem that much of a price.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
What should be more interesting is a listing of the 5 biggest NASs.
Is it pebibytes or petabytes? They're 12% apart. That's a big deal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebibyte
mod the parent post up if you have mod points...please
where's all that Karma?
I swear the LDS church has 20 Petabytes for geneology information.
How do they do backups (especially online ones) and restores?
Pr0ntab: A score, equal to the amount of time in tenths of a minute, that elapses from the moment a news article is posted to the first comment relating said article to a person's porn collection or viewing habits.
Pr0ntible: The statistical likelihood that any given article will have a low Pr0ntab score, where 1.0 is the highest score, and 0 the lowest.
Pr0ntabulary: A time sensitive, categorical table of subject matter, where each category is assigned a Pr0ntible, and said table is organized in descending order by Pr0ntible.
Example: On today's Pr0ntabulary, the Storage category ranks near the top.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
... Thanks for raping my computer, messing with my eyes and giving me 5 extra braintumors on top looking to that site!
heeeeellllooooo 1990! We're back!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
With all those (crappy bitrate admittedly) videos they must have a fair chunk of data lying around
Up for it.
I should know. I used to work for JPMChase until they outsourced us to IBM.
... get this...
I do not know why they want to keep their infrastructure "under wraps" according to the article. I know from previously working there that it is a hideous mess of MVS, AS/400, UNIX, Solaris, Windows NT, Novell, and who knows what else these days. They might have upgraded NT to 2000 by now, but I suspect NT still has a heavy presence. I'm not saying those are crap systems (MVS and AS/400 are incredibly good), but it's the implementation of how they are put together that is a mystery even to those who knew it from the inside, like myself. They were even using an insecure laptop with an outside line to send transactions to BankOne with
Hyperterminal!
This was all because of their shift from VSE to MVS, that Bank One would not recognize their mainframe's IP address, so this was their workaround.
From what my sources there tell me, the outsourcing decision was a disastrous decision they made. The place is full of back-stabbing, incompetent managers that care only about the bottom line (much like many corporations that outgrow their usefulness.) In retrospect, their decision to lay me off was probably the best thing that could have happened, as they had no clue how to take advantage of in-house talent. Now I am making considerably more in much better places, and would never even consider going back there, even if they offered triple my current salary.
Don't be mislead by articles about size. Often, there's much more going on behind the scenes than what they'd like you to believe.
Call of Cthulhu players know that your maximum SAN can never be more than 99 minus your Cthulhu Mythos Knowledge score.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
> 4 additionals bytes (B) dont seem that much of a price.
Sorry, had to say it... but are you really sure that "ytes" is beings represented on my machine in bytes? My browser might actually be translating into a unicode representation (or some other storage) that uses at least 2 Bytes per character. =-)
Because everybody around here thinks that means "peanut butter" and "turkey butter", respectively.
Back in 1998, the amount of storage they had was pretty impressive too. It took rooms and rooms to do it, but if I'm remembering this correctly they had about 5 terabytes of disk online and close to 5 petabytes of tape robots. It was a pretty slick automated system- everyone had accounts on a main fileserver, and files that had not been accessed in a certain amount of time were written to tape. If you were to try to grab a file that was on tape, it would fire up the robot, transfer it off the tape, and give it to you- all seamlessly. It was a little slow of course but you never had to do anything- it all appeared as though the files were in your home directory the whole time.
As the next round of NSF machines come online, this list will quickly be outdated. The least of these machines will have at least 1PB of *scratch* space. Tape libraries are going to be completely necessary rather quickly. SDSC's 19PB might seem like a lot, but we're constantly expanding that to deal with how quickly users dump data into it.
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
I guess that the NSA counter would be stored that on the NSA SAN. Hmmmm, NSA is an anagram of SAN. A SAN is an anagram of NASA, the government is everywhere in this. Perhaps all SANS have a back door for the NSA, some sort of _NSAKEY. Hey, _NSAKEY is an anagram of SNAKEY, if you don't think that something that is snakey isn't evil, you have better review the history of Adam and Eve. Maybe all SANs are controlled by the NSA. I think we all need a personal Gauss box (aka tinfoil hat) to prevent the NSA from monitoring our brainwaves from the now ubiquitous SANs that surround us and that share their data with the NSA's master SAN.
Think global, act loco
I know ... it's not a SAN. But a PB isn't what it used to be.
When a large university graduates (say 8000 people) you have to figure that in that stadium, auditorium, whatever each graduate has 20GB in their pocket between the phone and the music player plus, say, 3 family members with video recorder or cameras between 1 and 10 GB. Let's say it averages 2 GB.
(20 GB + 2 GB * 3) * 8000 graduates = 208 TB
I know its a quick estimate but that's a lot of storage and that's just what they are carrying around in their pockets.
CERN has 8 petabytes on just a CASTOR filesystem... Not to mention all the data on EGEE grid. Poor guys, they only quoted those _inferior_ commercial solutions :-).
Forgot that scientists have more guts...
And of course: don't you remember that Google has a SAN also?
Stop bitching about the numbers and go look up fibre channel.