Re: Moving data

On 2/9/2011 3:52 PM, Timothy J. Wielgos wrote:
> Here's an interesting problem.
>
> How do you move 25T of data from Chicago to LA?
>
> BDXL media is only 100G each, which would necessitate spanning the 
> data over 250 discs, so that's out.  Over the wire?  Yeech.  I can 
> hear the network guys screaming now.  The best I've been able to come 
> up with at this point is to buy 13 2T SATA disks and span 'em, but 
> that's just plain awkward and a bit kludgey...
>
> Any ideas?

I can't think of anything cheaper to store data on right now than 2TB 
hard drives. Especially if you don't already own a high capacity tape 
backup. The cheapest 2TB drive on newegg right now is $80.

Is your 25TB of data already compressed or not very compressible? You 
might get by with fewer drives.

Perhaps you can buy only 1/2 or 1/3 of the drives needed and ship them 
back and forth a few times. The shipping could be cheaper than buying 
more drives. Use a backup program to split the data into 2GB chunks and 
reassemble in LA.

Another angle: where will this data reside in LA? Maybe ship the SAN or 
storage array to Chicago, load it up locally over gigabit or faster 
networking, and ship the whole thing back to LA.

This all reminds me of an old quote:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes 
hurtling down the highway."
---Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). Computer Networks. New Jersey: 
Prentice-Hall. pp. 83. ISBN 0-13-349945-6.
(found a reference to it on wikipedia, in the "sneakernet" entry.

-Greg

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