24TB in 4u? Yes, please.
We're looking at disaster recovery solutions at work. We have traditionally contracted with Sungard to provide equipment in the event of a disaster. Once the equipment is delivered, we would theoretically restore from backups to get systems back up and running. Note that I said "theoretically". We have never had an "opportunity" to test this setup, but there has always been the little "ewww" feeling that pops up when thinking about having to restore all that data from tape.
After the Sungard contract was negotiated years ago, we have added a 10TB SAN and a 14TB Centera archive system. We do not have an offsite copy of the data on SAN and Centera. We were only recently able to get a tape jukebox in operation to begin making a copy of some of the data stored on Centera. Calculations show that at our current tape speeds, we will complete the offsite copy in around 8 months. This is ridiculous. With the amount of data we have to keep on hand due to HIPAA and other concerns, tape has become almost worthless as a mass archive media. We can't write the data to tape fast enough. Beyond that, there is no telling how long the tapes will last in storage before bit-rot sets in.
We are required to maintain patient documents for the lifetime of the patient. How long is that? 80 years, 100 years? We basically have to plan to keep all document images forever. Medical imaging (X-rays, etc.) don't have to be kept that long, but consume even more space. We are about to install a 64-slice CT machine which is rumored to generate over 1GB per study. Multiply that across thousands of studies per year and you begin to see the storage issues we are looking at.
Anyway, back to disaster recovery. Our Sungard contract expires soon, so they have been in doing dog-and-pony shows trying to get us to pay them several thousand dollars per month to manage an offsite data archive as well as provide equipment in the event of a recovery. At the prices they are quoting, we figured we could purchase our own secondary SAN and Centera and park it offsite somewhere and see ROI in a couple of years. So, we contacted or primary vendor and got a quote for said SAN and Centera. Ouch. Over 3/4 of a million dollars for the equipment to handle what we currently have as well as add enough space to do snapshots for backup purposes. That doesn't even cover the expense of building a secondary datacenter capable of powering and cooling two racks of hard disk.
All of this is lead-in to a conversation I recently had with a manager in my department. We were discussing the difficulty of getting the hospital board of directors to sign off on such a huge sum to simply give us a second copy of data we already have. We were both shaking our heads in wonder that the cost would be so high. I almost flippantly mentioned that we should just buy a Sun Thumper and stash it somewhere offsite to solve our problem. He did a quick google on it and was amazed that the box has 24TB of local storage. He got a phone call before we were able to discuss it any further and I went on to work on something else.
Later that afternoon, I was in the datacenter working on a server when a fellow sysadmin walked in and said, "That Sun Thumper you were talking about looks pretty cool!" Next thing I know, I overhear a conversation with the department director about getting a quote for "that Thumper box". Maybe a Thumper is on the horizon. And since it would be Solaris, that would fall under my purview.
Sweet.