Storage Costs

This page is under construction.

Last updated: 2024-04-28

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 sample pricing information from real-life hardware vendors, and casts them in terms of storage cost per terabyte/gigabyte per year/month. This is useful to model costs when you are purchasing server and storage hardware to run the LOCKSS software, rather than, say, using on-premise computing and storage from your organizational IT.

Methodology

To evaluate storage costs per terabyte/gigabyte per year/month, we are taking into consideration:

• Purchasing server hardware and hard disk drive storage for a 5-year service life with a 5-year warranty,

• Grouping disks into arrays using software RAID, which reduces the total capacity to a certain usable capacity but adds redundancy and fault tolerance in case of disk failure,

• Dividing a pre-tax, pre-shipping quote by a vendor on the open market (in US dollars) for one node, by the usable capacity of the disk arrays, by 5 years/60 months, to get a cost per terabyte/gigabyte per year/month.

If the creation of a LOCKSS network is considered, multiplying by the number of nodes desired gives a cost per terabyte/gigabyte per year to keep that many copies in the network.

Examples

Product	Disks	Disk arrays	Usable capacity	Price	5-year lifetime cost starting at
Thinkmate RAX XS4-11E3 (1U)	4x20TB	1 x 4 disks (RAID 5)	60 TB	$4,840	16.13 $/TB/yr = 1.61 ¢/GB/yr
Thinkmate RAX QS12-12E7 (2U)	12x20TB	1 x 12 disks (RAID 6)	200 TB	$10,060	10.06 $/TB/yr = 1.00 ¢/GB/yr
Thinkmate STX-NL QE36-14E3 (4U)	36x20TB	3 x 12 disks (RAID 6)	600 TB	$22,219	7.40 $/TB/yr = 0.74 ¢/GB/yr