Quite a project.  Sepaton has customers that store Petabytes of data on
their VTLs.  Sepaton claims performance of:
* 9600 MB/sec per VTL 
* > 1.2 Petabytes per VTL (without compression)
* RAID 6 protection

Obviously you need more information on the requirements.  Good luck!

Thanks,
Milton Johnson
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Bob Talda
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 2:16 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] Seeking thoughts/experiences on backing up large
amounts (say 50 Petabytes) of data

Folks:
   Our group has been approached by a customer who asked if we could
backup/archive 50 petabytes of data.  And yes, they are serious.

   We've begun building questions for the customer, but as this is
roughly 1000 times the current amount of data we backup, we are on
unfamiliar turf here.

  At a high level, here are some of the questions we are asking:
1) Is the 50 Petabytes an initial, or envisioned data size?  If
envisioned, how big is the initial data load and how fast will it grow?
2) What makes up the data: databases, video/audio files, other?
(subtext: how many objects are involved?  What are the
opportunities to compress/deduplicate?)
3) how is the data distributed - over a number of systems or from a
supercluster?
4) Is the data static, or changing slowly or changing rapidly? (subtext:
is it a backup or archive scenario)
5) What are the security requirments?
6) What are the restore (aka RTO) requirements?

   We are planning on approaching vendors to get some sense of the
probable data center requirements (cooling, power, footprint).

   If anyone in the community has experience with managing petatybes of
backup data, we'd appreciate any feedback we could incorporate.

   Thanks in advance!