Years ago I worked for a company that had a Novell network. We had a multi-server environment with lots of users and were having issues with both space and users. We bought a Netframe server, packed with 350MB drives and a limited edition 1000 user version of Netware v3.11. This was also the time when I got to use my C-language experience, writing a login utility that would handle our user IDs above 250 on Netware since that was the limit for all of our other servers.

That server, which cost something like $280,000 in 1991 was the biggest one on our network, with something like 8GB of storage. That seems like a pittance today, especially compared with the sale EMC just made. The Vatican is getting 2.8PB of storage from EMC for its library. EMC is also providing consulting services to digitize some of the historic manuscripts and documents that have been deteriorating from user and handling. It's an ambitious 9-year project, of which this is just the first 3 years.

Read the rest of "Serious Storage" at SQLServerCentral.