What did you do last summer?

In our line of business, the summer holidays are basically the only time of year when we can catch our breath and do heavy duty maintenance and prepare our data center for a new season of crazy growth. This summer we where painfully close to filling up our existing storage units so for months ahead we planned expanding our storage solution with a new piece of equipment from Dell/EMC, known as a CX3-20 SAN array. Being by far the biggest investment ever done by our company hardware wise, i thought I might share a few interesting (?) facts about this piece of machinery that you don't need a computer degree to understand...

• It can be set up to be connected via fiber channel to 128 servers.
• In theory it has 1000 times more bandwith than your average USB disk drive.
• It supports up to 120 disk drives (either "cheap" iSCSI disks or very expensive Fibre channel discs - depending on your I/O requrements).
• It's maximum raw data capasity is about 83 TB.
• If the SAN detects that a piece of hardware is about to fail an e-mail is immediately sent to Dell Gold support in Dublin. A harddisk can actually be changed remotely since there are several spare harddrives in the storage array.
• You could change one of it's power supplies without turning it off or in any way affecting it's operation.
• You could easily configure one of these to cost you as much as this one or approximately 2500 of these. :-)