On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 11:21 AM, Nathan Tallman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> My institution is going to be purchasing a preservation server sometime
> within the next year.

One thing you haven't mentioned so far is budget. Expect to fund this
at a fairly high level.

At our lab, we've found that providing storage with an onsite and
offsite tape backup costs out to about $1/GB/year, excluding labor
(and we already had an offsite storage facility, too). This compares
somewhat favorably to Amazon S3, but is definitely in the same order
of magnitude.

Your needs will vary somewhat (we have fairly high write loads, so we
spend a lot on tapes and want performance), but you'll probably come
to within a factor of 2-3 of that.

-n