100TB of Storage

[Jonathan4]

Hi there, 

We usually supply servers with <10TB of storage, but we have now been asked to provide storage of 100TB for storing large data files. 

Is there any website that can give me good instruction on how to implement massive storage with a HP Proliant Rack Mountable server? 

The specified preference is to have SAD disks in a RAID5 configuration directly connected to the server itself. There will be nobody on site who is a SAN expert or anything like that, so the customer preference it to have a simple solution that requires very little maintenance. 

thanks, 

[Torsten.]

Shared or directly connected to a single server? Topology? SAS, iSCSI or FC?

[Jonathan4]

Apologies I should have included this. I have edited the OP. 

[Torsten.]

This is what you can have for example inside a current DL380Gen10:

If needed, you can extend it with several external disk chassis.

[Jonathan4]

Hi Torsten, 

Thanks for your reply. I have been looking in to this further, and I guess I have two options:

1. Try to find a big server which will natively house 100TB of storage. If I use this option I will pay more for the server itself and it may not scale well if I need to add more storage later. 

2. Buy a smaller server with only an OD Disk, and then use an external drive bay for storage. I'm thinking that this might be the better option as it would be more scalable. 

There is no massive need for speed with this project, it would just need to be a rack mountable server, running Windows Server OS, with 100TB of storage available for storing large data files, and obviously at the best price.  

I'm thinking of going with option 2 - But I'm unfamiliar about how they connect to the actual server. I have never had the requirement to provide this amount of storage before!