Did you say 50TB?!!

A couple weeks ago, we had our first Grand Puhbah Storage Meeting at GCC.  I gathered together all the key staff that work with lots of large files to talk storage and digital asset management.  Since we are a media heavy/driven church we consume lots of drive space. 

Here's a snippet of the meeting invite that was sent out ...

Why a Meeting?

We have LOTS of files (many mission critical) getting saved in various places both at GCC and individual’s homes and ??? … some are backed up, some are not, some are on redundant drives, some not, etc … all of our storage resources are full or filling up fast and we’re only going to need LOTS more storage in the coming years … can you see a problem :-)

Couple questions to ponder prior to our first meeting …- How much storage space do you currently consume?

- Where do you save your mission critical data?

- Is it backed up? How often? Where?

- If the church or your home were destroyed what data could you still recover?  From where?

- How quick/easy is it for you to find older files?

- How quick/easy is it for someone else to find your files if you get hit by a bus?

Purpose of the meeting was to begin putting together what a 3 year storage and digital asset management plan might look like, assign cost figures to it, and then get it into the budget proposal process for next year.

First rough estimation is that we have 20TB (20,000GB) of physical storage space spread across various network shares, SAN, XRAID, media editing stations, various external drives, etc.  yowsa!  How much space will we need in 3 years?  Great question!  I think it's probably safe to say 50TB (useable) at this point until some actual predictive analysis is done.  Sound crazy?  When I talked with the guys at North Point last year they already had a 40TB+ XSAN.  (note to self - visit Ryan and crew at North Point in near future)

Here are the 3 driving points we're working from at this stage:
- Centralized Storage (one place where ALL files reside)
- Centralized Backup (one backup solution)
- Easy to find both current and archived stuff (need for structure and controls and attaching metadata for easy searching)

After an hour and a half we had no answers, but the consensus was that this IS something we need to be pursuing.  Now that Innovate is over I'm hoping I can divert some brain activity towards this project again.

Comments

[Mark Burleson]

Looks like we are headed down the same road here, except you are bit further in the game than I am.

I registered for the KC meeting, I am hoping all works out to be there.

I also decided to start a blog. blog.thoughtcoffee.net. no where near as great as you all, but at least its something :D

[Brian Baker]

Thanks for sharing your progress on this project. Even as a church plant we need to deal with storage issues, although at a much smaller scale. We are probably even more distributed since we only have a small percentage of our staff working out of our church office. Looking forward to heaing more.