My employer has, what I consider to be, a lot of data. We currently have about 10TB of data on our NAS, which is about its capacity, and we would have more data on it if we didn't constantly move data onto external hard drives and DVDs in order to free up space. Because we need to use all of that data, and we don't have the capacity to store any more, our backups are in shambles.
By my calculations in order to store all of the data we have, plus our archives, and backups, we'll need about 200TB of storage, this accounts for a bit of expected growth over the next few years as well.
My question is, with 200TB of storage space needed, should we be looking to set up a SAN, or should I instead be looking to get a large NAS like a Netapp appliance, or something else entirely? At what point do data storage requirements become big enough to warrant the effort involved in setting up and administering a SAN?