Yesterday, my Sun Microsystems vendor pointed out something I didn't want to think about: as my data storage climbs into multi-terabytes, our current way of storing/distributing data is no longer feasible. Damn, multi-terabyte datasets are irksome...

Here's some idea of the problem.
1) Everyone needs to see all these data, across many different computation machines.
2) Each dataset may need to be "live" for years, as research can take years to fruit. Hence, multi-stage storage strategy may not be applicable.
3) Windows XP has a 2TB volume size limit, and I do not know if CIFS/Samba can even support such big network shares.
4) Filesystem-wise, there will not be enough inodes, unless I use ZFS on Solaris.
5) Even my SAN has a problem, as each LUN can only go to 1TB. Solution? RAID-Z the LUNs.
6) And to top all these, the present dataset structure has to be reorganised, as it is just too messy to be scalable.

Let's not even talk about the network bandwidth problem...

Arrgh...... And I'm looking at scaling to 15TB in 3 years!!!

Here's to another round of persuading everyone that this is a time of changes. Aidios~