I remember in 1998 and 1999 when we were selling new NetApp F740’s and F760’s and it was a big deal to sell a system that went to 1 TB. It was not that long ago. This week we are working on a couple of Petabyte systems. Back in 1999 we were building 1 TB systems with 18 and 36 GB drives. Now we are building Petabyte systems with 500GB and 750 GB drives.
The funny thing is that even NetApp’s engineers are saying that up to 90% of storage is rarely looked at once it is put on disk. System administrators see this all the time. Which is one more reason that savvy storage adminstrators recognize that Zerowait allows them to keep their legacy systems running affordably, so they can buy a newer system appropriately sized for only the high performance storage that requires it. When budgets are tight reviewing how your storage is used makes more sense than ever.
