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."

... That we know about

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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...

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...

[WindowsIsForArseWipe]

1Gb of natilie portman and hot grits should be enough for anyone

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

[Bandman]

I'm not sure it's FUD, since that means "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt"

It's more, inaccurate, or maybe a result of shallow researching, or at the very least simplified.

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:...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.

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.

Re:Not so accurate

[LWATCDR]

"but most business application servers use less storage than you can get in an mp3 player)."
Yes they do.
I am migrating the our support call, issue tracking, and RMA data base to a new server. We take a good number of calls a year and have almost six years of data on the server. The dump file is only 16 megabytes. Most business data is still text and text just doesn't eat up that much space.

For home use doesn't and workstations does NAS make more sense than SAN? I am on a small network so we only use NAS for shared drives.

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.