Is Storage getting out of control?

[dk]

i just can't believe some of the stuff i am being asked to size up these days, people wit terabytes of data, 1 tb SAS drives, its getting ridiculous, will it jsut continue to grow exponentially?

HP have launched something called an Extreme Data Storage System, the smallest configuration you can get is 350TB's! It currently goes up to 820TB's using 1TB SAS drives and when 2TB SAS drives come out next year it will be over the petabyte size.

What sort of stuff do you have to be doing to need that amount of data. The company i work for are a 200 employee £100m company and we backup around 500gb a night, most of which is exchange.

I believe HP run their snapfish image farm off one or more of these, think they have a petabyte of photos currently, thats staggering.

The way they store the disks now is also ingenious, rather than have them all facing forward in the rack they have the in trays that pull out, great idea and i'm sure it will filter into products like the EVA and MSA to add SLOD's (s**t load of disks).

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA1-9286ENW.pdf

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/592778-0-0-225-121.html?jumpid=ex_r2880_go/extremestorage

anyway, i'm just amazed with how fast this is all moving, we'll probably have petabyte pc's in a couple of years time.

 

[Dafthead]

Bloody hell, we're a 3500 employee £175m company and we're only backing up 130GB a night

 

[Michael172]

Getting old mate.

But your right. I dont use (Personally) more than 40GB.

 

[dk]

Getting old mate.

But your right. I dont use (Personally) more than 40GB.

how do you mean getting old? As in me personally or the fact that storage is growing so much?

 

[Rob.]

it will never Down grade Just going get bigger and bigger Until we die

 

[Daz]

Bloody hell, we're a 3500 employee £175m company and we're only backing up 130GB a night

How? Heh.
I work with lots of companies.. and I would say a lot of them now backup 100GB+.. LTO2 is 200/400GB, and I very rarely suggest that now.. always LTO3/LTO4 for a bit of future proofing. And some of these are as low as around 20 staff!

 

[Skinny]

ive got 200gb on my comp, and my hd is almost full. Need something a tb size tbh, but i canny afford it at the moment.

 

[DrR]

It's all p**n, what else could it be,

 

[Gareth]

In work I backup around 1TB a night. At home I have about 40GB of files and photos.

 

[Michael172]

how do you mean getting old? As in me personally or the fact that storage is growing so much?

You personally, it was a joke. But i agree with you, i dont work for a decent company so i have no idea what people would need that much for tbh. remember getting to 500Gb and waiting for the 1TB drive to get released. Ive always lived off small drives for personal use, never understand why people would need so much storage on a Home Computer.

 

[Andy.]

I have 1.5 TB's on my PC. 60GB of program files, 5 GB of personal docs, the rest is just grot.

 

[Andy.]

never understand why people would need so much storage on a Home Computer.

Music collection - 80GB
Photos from camera - 147GB
Video from camera - 85GB

When storage is so cheap, why delete things?

 

[dk]

How? Heh.
I work with lots of companies.. and I would say a lot of them now backup 100GB+.. LTO2 is 200/400GB, and I very rarely suggest that now.. always LTO3/LTO4 for a bit of future proofing. And some of these are as low as around 20 staff!

we are using LTO3, the issue when you get to bigger tape drives is that you cannot stream the data quick enough for the tape to keep streaming and therefore get the speeds they say you can get, even with LTO4 its extremely difficult to get the speeds as you just can't keep a constant stream to it, and as soon as the stream stops to buffer the tape drive has to stop the tape, rewind it further back and then start the streaming again which slows everything down.

LTO5 is due out in the latter half of next year which is 280gb/s i think and you simply cannot stream that fast with traditional methods, you will need to stage it to disk first, something like a VLS (virtual library system) and then stream it from there, 1.6Tb native tapes though, stupidly big!

 

[dk]

makes me laugh when you get non techies say at work and you are telling them not to store their family pics on the really expensive EVA FC disk SAN storage and they turn around and say, why not just add a 1TB drive, they only cost £100 from pc world...........

 

[Paul RN]

88,000 employees & 35TB of user data backed up.

 

[Michael172]

Music collection - 80GB
Photos from camera - 147GB
Video from camera - 85GB

When storage is so cheap, why delete things?

Yeah your right. I keep a slave drive and i also have a portable which contains most of my music and all my software for installs.

 

[Gareth]

makes me laugh when you get non techies say at work and you are telling them not to store their family pics on the really expensive EVA FC disk SAN storage and they turn around and say, why not just add a 1TB drive, they only cost £100 from pc world...........

so true, we have staff from Bangalore who love to store mp3s and pictures, shame I delete it all as soon as it gets added to the file share.

 

[Michael172]

Back in my day we used to use 24 Gb drives and that was more than enough !!

 

[Gareth]

My first PC had a 256mb HDD.

 

[dk]

mine had a 10mb!

 

[ViolentJ]

Talking home use have you seen the size of installed games these days? Easy to see how home users would need 1TB+ if they're into their gaming. Add on to that some music, downloaded tv shows (skyplayer), photos etc

 

[MDP91]

Ive got 1TB, brought it from play to back up all me media files, its great, now my two 200gb drives on this pc are free at last !

 

[The Boosh!]

whats a perabyte

 

[Gary-Lew]

Talking of memory, I am getting one of these to stick under the tv, it plays all video format , plays music and does pics too, a good mate of my is the download king.

http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials...+Cyclone+1Tb+Media+Player+Box?productId=33732

 

[Longy]

whats a perabyte

1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

 

[The Boosh!]

1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

how many gigs is that

 

[Daz]

how many gigs is that

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=1PB+in+TB&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

 

[Gary-Lew]

how many gigs is that

imagine the ipod with that memory, look like a 120 litre Rucksack on your back

 

[dk]

a TB (terabyte) is a thousand GB's and a petabyte is a thousand TB's. Then its an exabyte!

So in essence, bloody large!

something i was told today, the best supercomputer from 2001, from IBM, can handle so many floating point calculations per second (think it was in the billions or something) and now its in the trillions for todays supercomputer, but a calculation you can make today that would take a week, would have taken 10 years on that same computer 7 years ago, so if you needed to make the calculation 7 years ago, you might as well not bothered and waited until 2008 and then run it in a week and it would still be 3 years quicker, made us chuckle anyway, thats how much we have moved on in that small amount of time!

 

[Michael172]

a TB (terabyte) is a thousand GB's and a petabyte is a thousand TB's. Then its an exabyte!

So in essence, bloody large!

something i was told today, the best supercomputer from 2001, from IBM, can handle so many floating point calculations per second (think it was in the billions or something) and now its in the trillions for todays supercomputer, but a calculation you can make today that would take a week, would have taken 10 years on that same computer 7 years ago, so if you needed to make the calculation 7 years ago, you might as well not bothered and waited until 2008 and then run it in a week and it would still be 3 years quicker, made us chuckle anyway, thats how much we have moved on in that small amount of time!

lol. Owned if anyone did that.

 

[H182]

Think its due to programs and things getting bigger with more detail and the cost of storage has come down. We are a construction company so have alot of drawings that take up space. Have about 2.5TB worth of stuff with about 260 users.

 

[mcoppen]

I think it is Self-perpetuating, as storage gets cheaper developers get lazier and just write bloated programmes, because they no longer have to worry about storage constraints. It will keep growing until they develop a more effective way of storing data.

 

[noel-pilot]

any reason why thats in white text?! lol home pc is up to nearly 2tb with dvd rips on it.

 

[McBunny]

twin floppy is where its at

 

[Michael172]

twin floppy is where its at

Sweet, got the running in Raid ?

 

[Sym0n]

88,000 employees & 35TB of user data backed up.

which company is that? I'd assume a government department with that sort of employee figure and data movement?

 

[Norris_309]

at my place we don't use quotas for our users mail or personal drive space..
one tw*t has an 8Gb mailbox!! eight..gig....mailbox

 

[ivegota16v]

Bloody hell, we're a 3500 employee £175m company and we're only backing up 130GB a night

were only a 100,000 employee 4 billon $ company and were only backing up a few petabyte's a night...

ho hum

 

[Scottydog]

at my place we don't use quotas for our users mail or personal drive space..
one tw*t has an 8Gb mailbox!! eight..gig....mailbox

+1, however we are thinking about implementing it.

Some people have GBs of crap and don't bother deleting/archiving anything! Some have e-mails dating back to 2001.

We had to install Terrabyte drives in our servers to cope.

What really annoys me is when a member of staff e-mails us accusing us of being Big Brother because we change some settings on the group policy which affects "My Laptop"

I love e-mailing them back with the staff laptop guidelines telling them straight that it isn't their laptop at all and we can do what we like

 

[Adam K]

i have a picture that i'll dig out from when i went to level 3 colo data centre in london.

nothing specifically to do with this thread, but it just reminded me of it.

anyway, that place was just immense, hundreds of millions of ££££ worth of servers and storage there. the photo i got was of the lift which was 11 foot deep, and also one of the colo suites where the room must have been the length of a couple of football pitches.