We Pick the World's Biggest SAN

Who's got the world's biggest SAN?

Three months after our first attempt to answer that question, we've got a fresh crop of candidates.

As before, we've focused on profiling organizations with storage networks in the petabyte range. Some of these, like AOL's, are fairly well documented. Others, like Snapfish's or the U.S. Navy's, are still in the building stage, but show every sign of growing to monumental proportions.

Some of the networks we've written up in our two feature articles aren't actually SANs at all. The Internet Archive, for instance, is based on an enormous Ethernet backbone populated by Linux servers, a la the rumored setup of Google's storage network. But we think the fact that it's built for storage qualifies it for our list.

So who's the biggest of them all? An absolute answer isn't possible, since storage networks from entities like Wal-Mart and Google are rumored to be just as enormous as the ones we've covered. But details on those installations are kept tightly under wraps, making it impossible to determine who's in fact got the world's biggest SAN.Still, we think that of the active storage networks we've covered, the largest is probably that of JPMorganChase, which has more than 14 Pbytes of primary storage based on IBM and Sun products. When it comes to backup, the San Diego Supercomputer Center takes the cake, with a 540-Tbyte SAN augmented by 2 Pbytes of disk storage and 25 Pbytes of tape storage based on Sun/StorageTek wares.

Click on the link below to see the networks we've profiled, in order of size:

Table 1:

As time passes, some of these networks will blow the doors off any of today's storage networks. The U.S. DOD, for example, is already populated by 17,000 to 20,000 Fibre Channel switch ports serving 3 million employees in 163 countries. It has 700 Fibre Channel switches and just under 60 directors. While its actual storage capacity isn't known, it's still on the grow.

The U.S. Navy's Navy and Marine Corps Intranet is also ballooning: The government wants to allocate 100 Mbytes of storage and 50 Mbytes of Exchange space to over 450,000 people.Some of the world's biggest SANs will rely on virtualization going forward. AOL already virtualizes 10 percent of its 4-Pbyte SAN.

We think these humongous networks are worth watching. At the very least, they're interesting. And while size isn't necessarily an indicator of technical sophistication, it's clear that big networks have some lessons to teach smaller fry.

Got any big SANs to share? Let us know. And have a happy holiday!

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