[ExI] The NSA's new data center

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 09:45:07PM +0200, Tomasz Rola wrote:

> First, while cost of mere storage (a.k.a. price per gigabyte) is dropping, 
> there is more to having extralarge database than just stacking haddrives 
> on each other. I think maintainance cost is going to kill any such project 

In practice, the dominant costs are energy, and then the raw hardware
costs, in case of storage, mostly disks. 

> very quickly. The biggest publicly aknowledged databases nowadays range 
> from petabyte to somewhere around 10PB (hard to tell where exactly this 

Database sizes are irrelevant, you're running a highly specialized system,
not stock Oracle. 

It's perfectly possible to keep ~PByte/rack online, and I would put
the limit at 10^4 racks/facility. So in practice you're looking at 
~10 EByte/facility. It's probably more ~1 EByte/facility.

Many other of your assumptions are equally questionable, I will not however
address them in detail.