Storage Administration

That last series of articles might suggest I've been doing storage administration for a while. And I have. But every so often I run across an article that just reminds me that I'm still in the shallow end.

Like this article from The Register, going over Quantum's new mega-library, the i6000. I have a buddy who has an i2000 and I've petted it. Lovingly. *sigh* This new baby can store 8PB. Petabyes, baaybee. LTO5. Mmmm. Sexy.

Storage is a major concern just now. One of the main reasons that there are still IT stacks on campus that aren't centralized is storage. We have researchers, generally in the College of Science and Technology, that use departmental, rather than central, resources for storing their data. Departmental means servers, so CST represents the biggest non-ITS concentration of IT at WWU. They don't have any shared storage arrays over there, so they make do with large direct-attach-storage servers over there. A quick back-of-envelope calculation says that they have about as much storage in DAS as we have on our fastest SAN-attached storage array. Combine that with the chronic storage shortages central IT has had for the past, oh, 15 years and you have an entrenched set of servers over there.

If they were to join us in the borg ITS my area just might crack 100TB in disk space. Ooo. An i2000 with LTO4 still would be overkill for a storage network that large. And the i2000 can expand to several cabinets.

Yeeeah. WWU is still strictly small time when it comes to storage. In a lot of ways I'm a Stand Alone Storage Administrator.