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Storage Costs
This page is under construction.
Last updated: 2024-04-26
The LOCKSS "bring your own storage" model can make the ongoing procurement costs of a LOCKSS approach, like joining as a node in an existing LOCKSS network or creating a new LOCKSS network, seem difficult to compare to the ongoing subscription costs of other approaches, like cloud storage or digital preservation services that charge a monthly or annual storage fee. This wiki page informally gathers pricing information from real-life hardware vendors, and casts them in terms of storage cost per terabyte/gigabyte per year. This is useful to model costs when you are purchasing server and storage hardware to run the LOCKSS software, as opposed to leveraging on-premise IT infrastructure provisioned locally by your organization.
To evaluate storage costs per terabyte/gigabyte per year, we are taking into consideration:
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Purchasing server hardware and hard disk drive storage for a 5-year service life with a 5-year warranty,
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Grouping disks into arrays using software RAID, which reduces the total capacity to a certain usable capacity but adds redundancy in case of disk failure,
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Dividing a pre-tax, pre-shipping quote by a vendor (in US dollars) for one node, by the usable capacity of the disk arrays, by 5 years, to get a cost per terabyte/gigabyte per year.
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If the creation of a LOCKSS network is considered, multiplying by the number of nodes desired, to get a cost per terabyte/gigabyte per year to keep that many copies in the network.