The World’s Biggest Storage Networks

Byte and Switch are compiling a list of the worlds biggest Storage Area Networks (SAN) and have release some of their initial findings. The purpose of the study to assess some of the lessons learned by corporations when scaling to such gargantuan levels of storage.

The results so far are utterly astonishing and the article is well worth reading. Impressive enough is the fact that the top five each have active storage capacities in the order of Petabytes (PB) but also that the San Diego Supercomputer Centre has over 18PB of tape storage (yes, that’s right, tape) and the Department of Defense has over 20,000 Fibre Channel switch ports.

Here is a summary of the top 5 (so far) showing the key suppliers in each case.

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Particularly interesting (but not entirely surprising) is the high use of Sun and/or SGI equipment by four of the above.

Source: SlashDot