So much memories from that era. I saw my first 1TB storage array back then, it was an EMC Clariion fibre channel raid box, it cost nearly 1m$ and it was a full rack of 9GB dual-ported 15k RPM disks.
We had an IBM ESS "Shark" back then. A fantastic piece of kit but totally overkill for us in the end. It was basically the size of two or three standard racks, full of shelves for drives, and two RS/6000 AIX servers, and trays of redundant controllers.
You could pull trays of drives, one of the RS/6000's, or any of the controllers, and it'd keep on humming along thanks to redundancy pretty much everywhere. If any components went bad it'd call home to IBM via a modem.
And it could do things like automatic mirroring to a remote site.
1.5TB was a common configuration, but you could connect multiple boxes to increase capacity.
Symmetrix, two Ms. They were more of a mainframe thing I thought. I never really got to play much with the really big gear, Starfires, Superdome and so on. By the time I got to use a 64-way SMP box (Origin 3800) it was already obsolescent and replaced a few years later with a pair of dual-quad core Xeons.
You could pull trays of drives, one of the RS/6000's, or any of the controllers, and it'd keep on humming along thanks to redundancy pretty much everywhere. If any components went bad it'd call home to IBM via a modem.
And it could do things like automatic mirroring to a remote site.
1.5TB was a common configuration, but you could connect multiple boxes to increase capacity.