Maybe not Highly Technical but Highly Curious

[Texun]

This is probably the dumbest question of the year but I've wondered about this for a very long time. Someone with IT experience can probably answer it easily.

What type of computer and storage devices are used for corporate billing systems like utility or credit card companies? A company I work for uses ICOMS with hundreds of thousands of accounts. No matter how many users are online, or what type of account info is needed, the access is the same... always fast. Do they use a cluster of servers and racks of 3.5' hard drives or something else?

 

[Duwelon]

Based on my experience with one large financial firm fairly recently: Tapes. Proven technology and stored properly (temperature, humidity and purity controlled) will last a long time. There are some really elaborate and expensive tape solutions out there that use a mechanical servo to automatically grab and load tape's as user's need files.

And, they no doubt use some enterprise hard drives for immediate storage, with a lot of that info being in the RAM already when you go to access it.

 

[quakefiend420]

massive SQL databases, most likely

you'd be amazed at how quickly data can be returned from hundreds of millions of rows by fast hardware when the database is properly designed

tape for backup and many racks of magnetic disks

 

[quakefiend420]

Based on my experience with one large financial firm fairly recently: Tapes. Proven technology and stored properly (temperature, humidity and purity controlled) will last a long time. There are some really elaborate and expensive tape solutions out there that use a mechanical servo to automatically grab and load tape's as user's need files.

And, they no doubt use some enterprise hard drives for immediate storage, with a lot of that info being in the RAM already when you go to access it.

i would really like to see a tape system like that, reminds me of the movie Hackers

 

[alkemyst]

Based on my experience with one large financial firm fairly recently: Tapes. Proven technology and stored properly (temperature, humidity and purity controlled) will last a long time. There are some really elaborate and expensive tape solutions out there that use a mechanical servo to automatically grab and load tape's as user's need files.

And, they no doubt use some enterprise hard drives for immediate storage, with a lot of that info being in the RAM already when you go to access it.

Tape is really less reliable than many more modern solutions. Too many out there have been burned by tapes that will not reload.

Also as technology changes people that need to go back to an 'old tape' find out they no longer can get the proper reader or it's now incompatible with the current OS.

 

[alkemyst]

optical jukeboxes are a better solution to tape.

 

[Oyeve]

optical jukeboxes are a better solution to tape.

I was gonna say this. I did stint for NYC comptroller office about 15 years ago and they have/had massive data and were using an optical storage system Was pretty cool for 15 years ago.

 

[omghaxcode]

major companies don't use tape as their main memory, it is too slow. tape is used as a backup.

I think this might help. I worked interned in tier 3 IT at Motorola one summer. this is what they used for large scale data storage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_network

 

[Texun]

major companies don't use tape as their main memory, it is too slow. tape is used as a backup.

I think this might help. I worked interned in tier 3 IT at Motorola one summer. this is what they used for large scale data storage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_network

Makes sense. Thanks!

 

[RemyCanad]

It really all depends on the software being used in the system. I would expect most will be running a very large SQL database probably on Oracle RAC, DB2, or MS SQL. Some may utilize another solution due to legacy software and design.

Hardware wise it really just depends. It's not uncommon to still see z-series connected to DS8K storage subsystems. Another option is the IBM iSeries which is now really just the pSeries hardware running iOS.

As far as x86 hardware you will see a mix of virtualized application servers and then generally physical database servers. The hardware itself can be pretty massive for an x86 machine. I have machines here in the 40 core and 512GB of RAM range and they are not considered huge. You can then throw multiple servers behind SQL clustering software to help with the load.

Storage for these systems is often the real kicker. The link to SANs is correct in that they use them but the selection of the type of SAN and storage subsystem is the real answer.

Every storage sub system has it's own unique capabilities and limitations. Based on the needs of the application, the subsystem selected can change along with it's configuration. Here are some companies that provide large SAN systems. I generally work with IBM hardware so I will list a few of those. Also note that these systems can be stripped together for even more performance using virtualization hardware such as the IBM SVC.

IBM
DS 8000 - 8800
DS 5300 (Really just a NetApp rebranded by IBM)
XIV

NetApp
EMC
HP
And then a ton more from DELL who has been buying up some vendors to someone like RAMSAN.

That is just really just a start. There are also new devices such as the FusionIO card that are being used more and more.

As far as the SAN itself, generally most people are still running Fibre Channel networks at 4GiB or 8GiB as needed. FCoE and 10Gig E are starting to move in but so far I haven't see a huge uptake in it.