Re: XSAN over 100 TB

We're in the 100+ Tb category, but it's split into three separate SANs... primarily for reasons of convenience, security, and operation. Our offices are spread over two buildings across the street from each other. The cost of running a fibre link across the boulevard is in the six figure range... primarily for "pole rental" to the utility company. Don't even get me started about bureaucracy!

Our storage is a mix of brand new Active Storage units and old as dirt Apple X-Raids. All three SANs have this mix. No Promise boxes at all. We're quite happy with how it's performed so far, and I don't see the 100 Tb benchmark as an issue at all.

Jordan's point about back up is well taken. At a certain point of "mission criticalness", Raid 5 just doesn't cut it. However, we take a pragmatic approach to backup. With our workflow, the entire 100+ Tb is NOT mission critical. We do keep the original media as the ultimate fail safe. If we know that a specific show is nearing deadline, and any interruption of work would ruin everyone's day, we will copy that media local to one of the internal drives on a local client. With up to six TB easily held locally, there's very few projects that we can't back up this way.

I agree that if you're trying to keep the entire system backed up onto LTO it would be impractical. That's why we don't even bother. For someone that needs that kind of "mission critical" uptime, there are plenty of mirroring solutions out there. You just have to be willing to pay for it. If you follow any of Bob Z's rants... you'll know that most people on these boards have NO IDEA how much that would cost.

So... in SAN terms, bigger IS better, but you've got to be realistic about the cost of backing up a large system. Breaking down your critical needs to a much smaller size is the most practical way to approach this issue.

Mark