Mega-Storage

Last Wednesday afternoon I took a slight tour of the HP(formerly known as Compaq) campus just south of where I live. The campus comprises 22 buildings which used to do manufacturing and administration. Now most of the manufacturing is gone and just the offices remain. The one exception to this is in high end servers and storage which was what I came to see.

I spent two and a half hours with HP reps talking about things with names like SAN, MSA, EVA and blade servers.

The MSA was the low end storage device. They start out as about 1 tera byte. When I went to Ohio State the computer took up the entire seventh floor of the Physics building and I doubt the whole floor had a terra byte of data that was in just part of the MSA rack.

Both the EVA and the MSA are fully Raid compliant and redundant.

The EVA was even more amazing. A single rack contained 32 terabytes of data, fully redundant. Two controllers, everything connected by fiber. In order to connect this beast to your network you need a special fiber connector, actually two since everything is redundant.

If you are not familiar with these types of devices what they really boil down to is arrays of hot swapable hard drives linked together and made to work by some pretty incredible software.

SAN by the way stands for Storage Array Network.

Blade servers are basically servers in a drawer that can be stacked in a rack. I forget how many you can get. Something like 128 single cpu blades and 40 or 50 dual cpu blades. Real neat stuff.

The cost for all the real neat stuff? Well is starts at a low end of 85k and goes up, way up from there. Actually not bad if you have terabytes of stuff to store.