On Aug 27, 2009, at 6:22 AM, Rosalyn Metz wrote:
Might I suggest you look into cloud computing services if you're
looking at
different options. (I know you're all shocked I suggested it). If our
budget weren't so abysmal (and going to get worse) we would be using
it
right now rather than the snap server we purchased with leftover
funds. The
benefits of using the cloud is of course the elasticity it offers
you. The
negative is that you have to pay to put your files into the cloud
and then
pay again to take them out (and since we've already been slashed 30%
and are
guaranteed another slash...that idea was shot down).
I did a rough cost analysis of S3 as an offsite archive of roughly
20TB of data with estimated growth of between 6-8TB per year based on
current growth rates. It ended up looking something like this:
$1.80 * 20000 storage
$2.04 * 20000 data transfer
$36,000 year 1 storage (20TB)
$40,800 year 1 data transfer (20TB)
$46,800 year 2 storage (26TB)
$12,240 year 2 data transfer (6TB)
$61,200 year 3 storage (34TB)
$16,320 year 3 data transfer (8TB)
$213,360 over 3 years
This only took into account storage and data transfer costs, and did
not include READ/WRITE request costs.
Granted, this was awhile ago. I haven't checked to see if Amazon has
changed any of their pricing or policies so this could be out of date.
It looks like the data transfer cost could be avoided by shipping the
data to them, although I don't know if they will do that for large
amounts of data.
If you're ONLY looking at storage costs, SATA drives in enterprise
RAID systems range from about $1.00/GB to about $1.25/GB for online
storage. If you don't need immediate access to files, then nearline
and offline storage is much cheaper. I can't find the exact figures,
but LTO-4 tapes have a 800GB native / 1.6TB compressed capacity with a
cost of something like $0.25/GB or something like that.
Also, don't rule out compression. The TIFF files that I was told were
not compressable I was able to compress down from about 20TB to about
4TB using bzip2 -9. It will require some intermediate decompression
when someone needs to use them, but it's a lot less expensive to store
4TB than 20TB. You could even decompress the files on-the-fly without
too much effort.
Ryan
--
Ryan Ordway E-mail: rord...@oregonstate.edu
Unix Systems Administrator rord...@library.oregonstate.edu
OSU Libraries, Corvallis, OR 97331 Office: Valley Library #4657
