hi,

you are right. Old data will be less important at some point of time. An archive will be necessary for historic data. But i would be nice to have it available - maybe with less speed.

We are doing data mining, so a large collection of historic data will help us. We are currently developing and testing different ways of analyzing our data so it will help us to have lots of data available with a performance high enough to do many experiments without having to wait for weeks in every step of development.

At the moment, our hardware guys have a clear tendency towards netapp hardware, with an estimated cost of about 1 million euros for a 200 TB solution. This is a huge leap of costs compared to our current hardware and it would be nice to have at least one or two alternative suggestions for the discussion about the best hardware for our purposes. Does any of the SAN manufacturers provide any technical feature that others do not?

P.S. Our options seem to be only HP or NetApp.