Re: XSAN over 100 TB

It won't matter what storage you have tied into your XSAN, unless you have some weird LUN sizes, but if you are under normal conditions with "regular" LUN sizes you should be fine no matter what fibre solution you work with. The size of the XSAN volume is a matter of its filesystem not the RAID.

With 2TB enterprise drives just around the corner (they're here, but not readily deployed) you will see 100TB+ XSANs with minimal amount of money needed to get there.

Here is my issue with 100TB+ XSAN volumes... How are you going to back up the data? If LTO, how fast is your recovery? (answer: sloooooowwwwww) So, that being said, there are plenty of discussions going on for the correct way to put together 100TB+ volumes, it just depends on your circumstances. If you are a broadcast facility, then you might need two identical 100TB volumes, ready to back each other up if failure occurs. Or if you are a post house, you might opt for a fibre near line or LTO, just be prepared to be down for at least a week for data recovery.

If your budget just gets you to 100TB without backup and you will build that "later," I'd scale down the XSAN plans to fit money for a backup solution. It is too important nowadays with so much tapeless work going on. (I think I went on a tangent, but I felt it is an important topic for those reading and planning an XSAN)

-Jordan

Senior Systems Engineer
Active Storage Labs
Los Angeles, CA