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."

Comments

... That we know about

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.?

Re:... That we know about

[Anonymous Coward]

And there wasn't even a single Japanese firm listed. You'd think they'd have the biggest SANs of all.

Re:... That we know about

[Chapter80]

I was thinking San Diego, San Francisco, San Antonio, San Jose, Santa Claus.

Not so accurate

[cymru_slam]

I work for one of the organisations listed and I have to say that what they described sounds NOTHING like our infrastructure :-)

Re:Not so accurate

[Znork]

"you shouldn't have end users plugged into a SAN."

Exactly why shouldn't you have end-users plugged into a SAN? I run a SAN, and I find that diskless workstations PXE booting off gigabit iSCSI storage are a huge improvement to having local disk. For more or less exactly those reasons; performance, redundancy, flexibility, growth and sharing. Not to mention data consolidation and savings in less wasted local storage.

I suspect the idea that SAN's are for servers is mostly spread by overcharging SAN vendors who dont want their profit margins eroded by inexpensive consumer devices. In fact, I'd say consumer storage is rapidly progressing beyond the server side and is these days the main driver behind storage expansion; I certainly know my home storage needs expands faster than the vast majority of the servers I admin (yes, there are the we-want-to-simulate-the-atoms-in-the-ocean exceptions, but most business application servers use less storage than you can get in an mp3 player).

Re:Not so accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it sounds like your environment is PC based. The environment I work in is server based. An end user could leave his/her computer in a taxi and we can have them up and running and productive on a new PC within minutes with little chance of actually losing anything. I say little chance because although we make every attempt to force things to the network through our computer system policies and document management systems, sometimes they still manage to put things in "My Documents" but that is the exception, not the norm. It is more then just a single user though. With that system in place, our entire office in downtime Washington DC could be blown up and the bulk of the offices business operations can be up and running from another one of our offices in another city or our companies DR site in a short period. For our environment, it is much easier to manage a backend and provide adequate remote user tools (Citrix for example) then it is to attempt to manage storage on a thousand or so individual computers. Imagine trying to do disaster recovery or emergency planning for an office that had a bunch of individual personal storage devices and a local PC based file storage system.
Not everyone needs a SAN for storage but using a SAN is a very sound decision for those that need the capabilites it provides. A SAN is not just a buzz word although I do not doubt some people bought them without understanding what they were getting and why.

Re:Not so accurate

[DarthTaco]

How about SHallow and Inaccurate Tripe?

Re:Not so accurate

[Philosinfinity]

Go to a law firm and ask them about their document management systems or their litigation support applications. Go to a bank and ask them about their financial records. What about email archives for compliance? Size up the disk space utilization and I think you will see many application servers that are significantly larger in storage than an MP3 player. Point taken, SANs can be used at the desktop level. But I partially wonder why? Wouldn't it be better to synchronize users' data folders with shares on a server that is diskless to the SAN? Why waste all that 'spensive storage just to make workstations diskless? Unless you are using a Compellant SAN or some SAN that is running a deduplication engine on the fly, you're stuck storing an OS install for each workstation.

Besides this, I've always felt that the big advantage of a SAN is the ability to replicate an entire environment to another site in case of disaster. SANs are really utilized to the max in enterprise environments where these features are necessary for successful business operations.

Re:Not so accurate

[gnuman99]

our entire office in downtime Washington DC could be blown up

I sense the little counter at NSA/"homeland security" click up -- Internet chatter about possible attack just increased! Few more like that, and terror alert will go up!! Geez people, watch what you type!

Very U.S. Centric...

[Noryungi]

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...

Re:Very U.S. Centric...

[barry_the_bogan]

They're talking about the "world", as defined by the World Series Baseball people. Lame story.

Re:Very U.S. Centric...

[perturbed1]

I'll talk about one of the experiments, ATLAS. Yes we "generate" petabytes of data per day. It's rather easy to calculate actually. One collision in the detector can be compressed down to about 2MB raw data-- after lots of zero-suppression and smart-storage of bits from a detector that has ~100 million channels worth of readout information.

There are ~30 million collisions a second -- as the LHC machine runs are 40Mhz but has a "gap" in its beam structure.

Multiplying: 2 * 10^6 * 30 * 10^6 = 6* 10^13 Bytes per second. So ATLAS "produces" 1 petabyte of information in about 13 seconds!! :)

But ATLAS is limited to being able to store about ~300 MB per second. This is the limit coming from how fast you can store things. Remember, there are 4 LHC experiments after all, and ATLAS gets its fair share of store capability.

Which means that about of 30 million collisions per second, ATLAS can only store 150 collisions per second.... which it turns out is just fine!! The *interesting* physics only happens **very** rarely -- due to the nature of *weak* interactions. At the LHC, we are no-longer interested in the atom falling apart, and spitting its guts (quarks and gluons out). We are interested in rare processes such as dark-matter candidates or Higgs, or top-top production (which will dominate the 150Hz btw) and interesting and rare things. In most of the 30 million collisions, the protons spit their guts out and much much *rare* things occur. The catch of the trigger of ATLAS (and any other LHC experiment for that matter) is to find those *interesting* 150 events out of 30 million every second -- and do this in real time, and without a glitch. ATLAS uses about ~2000 computers to do this real-time data reduction and processing... CMS uses more, I believe.

In the end, we get 300 MB/second worth of raw data and that's stored on tape at Tier 0 at CERN permanently -- and until the end of time as far as anyone is concerned. That data will never *ever* be removed. Actually the 5 Tier 1 sites will also have a full-copy of the data among themselves.

Which brings me to my point that CERN storage is technically not a SAN (Storage Area Network)... (My IT buddies are insisting on this one. ) I am told that CERN storage counts as a NAS (Network Attached Storage). But I am going to alert them to this thread and will let them elaborate on that one!

Re:Very U.S. Centric...

[bushki3]

from TFA

"We at Byte and Switch are on the trail of the world's biggest SAN, and this article reveals our initial findings."

and this

"Again, this list is meant to be a starting place for further endeavor. If you've got a big SAN story to tell, we'd love to hear it."

oh, and this too

"we present five of the world's biggest SANs:"

notice how everything in TFA clearly says this is not THE 5 BIGGEST SAN's in the world but the 5 largest they have found SO FAR.

I know -- I must be new here, but I'm getting there. I didn't read the whole article, just a few sentences from the first page.

The big surprise is

[Centurix]

that all the disks are formatted FAT32...

Pronunciation is the key

[User 956]

Finally somewhere to store all my porn

We're talking about Petabytes, not Pedobytes.

14Pb for 170k employees...

[Joce640k]

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)

Re:14Pb for 170k employees...

[fellip_nectar]

No he didn't.

At Last!

[Zymergy]

Someone can install a FULL install of Windows Vista!

Shouldn't this be written somewhere?

[rm999]

SAN = Storage area network

Re:Shouldn't this be written somewhere?

[OverlordQ]

This is slashdot, if you dont know what SAN stands for, please turn in your geek card and report to Digg.

Let's hope CERN's data can be zipped...

[Joce640k]

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...!

Just SANs... so what?

[Duncan3]

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.

Details?

[clarkkent09]

Ah, go on tell us. We won't tell anybody

Re:...and why does the article say "Pbytes", "Tbyt

[imsabbel]

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.