Dr. Kirkby -- I support about thirty or so UNIX servers (Solaris, AIX, Linux) that represent the development, testing, and production environments for the electronic resources of the University of Wisconsin at Madison Libraries. I started using Amanda 2.4.x about two years ago to do backups on these systems, originally using a collection of miscellaneous resources (hosts, holding disks, and tape drives) left over from previous backup strategies.
We're just now finishing a re-implementation of the whole system that will give us 1 TB of capacity on our primary (and now, finally, dedicated) Amanda host. We use a modestly-priced Linux host, coupled with 500 GB of IDE-to-SCSI holding disk, and five Overland LibraryPro AIT-3 autoloaders. We configure for at least fourteen days of mixed full and incremental backups (level zeroes every three days), plus at least six weeks of level zero offsites. Cost of the entire system, including tape media and three years of onsite next-day support for all hardware, was $60k. Doing it again, shaving support costs and with recent pricing changes, I think I could probably do it for $50k even. By comparison, I did a three-year cost workup for buying backups on our central storage solution (Tivoli-based). Even assuming low initial capacity, ramping up gradually to 1 TB across the three years, the cost was easily $200k+, for a system that (in my opinion) would be almost useless to us in a true disaster-recovery scenario, as opposed to occasional file restores when someone fumble-fingers an "rm -rf". I have been told that I didn't allow for the cost of my time to implement and babysit our system; but from watching one of my colleagues struggle with our Tivoli implementation, I'm not sure it makes that much of a difference. And that same colleague has now approached me about buying some of the excess time and capacity on our Amanda system, so we'll do some cost-recovery there as well. -mgs
