Recently in London I was talking to the CIO of one of the larger Brokerage firms. He noted that they currently have 750 terabytes of storage and that he expects by this time next year to have twice as much 1.5 petabytes.

How do you backup 1 petabyte of storage? The answer is: you don’t. At least not in any conventional way… there is no technology on the market that can write a petabyte of storage to off-line media in any reasonable amount of time. Size changes everything.

Now if you’re a Global 2000 multi-national like this brokerage firm, you may be able to skip backups altogether. (Backups, not archiving) If you have a world-wide distributed database, say in London, New York, and LA, and all of London, New York, and LA have ceased to exist, you probably don’t care very much about those very safe tapes in Iron Mountain… There would be no place to restore them to.

This is a turning point in our industry. Conventional backups must now give way to on-line backups, tiered storage and archiving. Don’t go buying stock in any of the tape companies…

Tuesday, February 14, 2006 4:06:58 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Observations | Storage Management