The Lone Sysadmin » The Problem With I/O:

It used to be troublesome when someone needed 200 GB of disk space. It was this big Negotiation between a system administrator or storage administrator and the DBA, or the user, or the application admin about why and how and how long and space is expensive and etc. etc. [...]

With the advent of 300 GB fibre channel drives and 750 GB SATA drives storage administrators don't need to worry about any of that crap anymore. They don't even bat an eye at a 500 GB space request because it isn't a problem anymore. Some of you will say I am spoiled in the environment I'm in, but it's a fact for me. You want 500 GB? Sure thing, it'll be ready in a minute.

The problem now is I/O.

Since I'm at the pissant end of the scale, this isn't something I've stumbled across yet - in fact, we're still at the 'cool, we have so much space!' stage. I'm sure that will wear off.

We're also at the stage of trying to figure out how to consolidate, how to manage the downtime required to get fibre cards into existing (new, but not *that* new) servers, how much fibre infrastructure to buy, and how the hell are we going to justify it to management.

Fun.

It's interesting to see where the larger players are heading, it's like a forecast of where we'll be in a couple of years.