Personally I'd be investigating getting a big fat dedicated line installed and use an online backup solution. Initial setup will take time but subsequent backups can be on an incremental basis.
Is this a serious suggestion? Please tell me it's not!!

Personally I'd be investigating getting a big fat dedicated line installed and use an online backup solution. Initial setup will take time but subsequent backups can be on an incremental basis.

Going back a bit - for a 42TB SATA Beast - depending on your relationship and how much discount you can extract, maybe £23k?
Dammm that's expensive, we managed to get one for a bit more than half of that.![]()
depends if it does the OP out of a job by removing the management infrastructure![]()
My of my time is spent being a photography/print/sound/theatre/video technician and everything else with a plug technician.I don't think a university will be lacking bandwidth! They're normally on multiple gbit links already. I imagine the Janet network is 10gbit + by now?
Just a question is it 1 room where this information will be accessed or is it everywhere?
I'm sorry here if I'm missing the point but if students are accessing this sort of information (30GB) accross even gigabit links theres going to be huge data link bottle necks. If files (movies/music) is few GB each and a room of lets say 24 PCS is been used ..... theres hugh problems with speed here.
I work in a college and we have issues with 1 room (Music production) alough the links arn't updated to GB but we are looking at new Apple Mac solutions and local storage as network storage is just too much and bandwidth issues occur.
Put the emphasis onto the student, give them all a 250GB USB disk. Much faster than network and cheaper!!!
I am shocked that your talking about 50TB here and not a backup solution is in the plan. I wouldn't dare touch a system where theres no solutions in place for data loss. Nasty...
Yeah, the facility will consist of one room split into 3 areas (Input, process and output) with a total of 38 computers. There won't be a bottleneck for our needs. We will be doing video editing off the SAN, transcoding footage into ProRes422 (1080p 25fps) which runs at about 17MBps. A gigabit connection will be more than enough for say 4 streams of footage (The Mac pros will start to struggle before we saturate the connection.) This just leaves the SAN, which we are speccing to support this sort of data rate over the 38 computers which is the main reason it is going to be rather expensive.
Anyway, the Satabeast (or equivalent. Any other suggestions are wlecome) looks very promising and should be possible for the budget.
Equallogic 6500E http://www.equallogic.com/products/default.aspx?id=7905
If you don't mind SATA drives.
What sort of policies are the workstations applying? Sorry did you say they were Windows or Apple OS? Do the students log into the MACS? I find that a lot of the issues we get is login speeds, still on XP but in 6 months time upgrading to GB + WIN7 VD.
Depends on your relationship with Dell really! Retail prices are about £400 per 1TB drive, or £500 for 2TB drives, but you can expect significant savings (40%+) if your university buys lots of stuff from Dell.Thanks for the suggestion. Any idea of the price for a fully loaded one with 1TB drives?