[ale] A petabyte here, a petabyte there ...

[Jeffrey B. Layton]

At my previous company we were talking to the LDS Church about
putting their genealogical data on-line (all of it). They wanted to do
something like a google where they had multiple sites to handle
queries and also for fault tolerance. It was a really, really fascinating
meeting. They talked about a 100 year plan for the data. How to
migrate it to new systems, how to preserve it, how to storage, could
systems be pulled off-line for periods of time (to save power). Plus
they had a gentlemen who was leading their risk management portion
of the project. Absolutely a fascinating project.

They were talking about at least 36PB of data at each site with
growth basically following the increase in disk capacity.

We didn't win the project, but I'm not sure anyone did. It was a
massive project and a really cool one. I wish them good luck.

Jeff

> I've had 2 different client conversations in the last 2 days.
>
> All I can say is "A petabyte here, a petabyte there, and pretty soon
> you're talking real data".
>
> Seriously, one claimed to have 3 PB of unstructured data (office
> files, logs, etc.).  The other one was smaller.  They only had 1 PB of
> unstructured data.
>
> I admit to being a little taken aback, especially the first time.  I
> guess it is time to add exabyte to my repertoire.  That way I can say,
>
> "Oh.., only .1% of a Exabyte, sure our solution can handle that with
> no problem. (cough, cough) I was afraid you would need something
> large."
>
> Are others starting to see numbers like that at the large Enterprise
> level?  (Both of these companies had multiple NAS units at multiple
> sites.  I think the biggest single NAS I heard of is 200TB so far.  I
> really had gotten away from these huge systems for while.  I guess I
> need a refresher about what's happening out there in the "enterprise
> world".)
>
> Greg
>