[ome-users] OME and offline archiving

[Ian Dobbie]

Mario Valle <mvalle at cscs.ch> writes:

> The project for which I'm evaluating OME plans to produce 9 TB
> (uncompressed) of images during its lifetime.
>
> Obviously I cannot leave all the images on-line. The idea is to have
> one or two image stacks online and put the rest on our tape
> archive. Obviously all metadata continue to be online.

I don't see how leaving all the images online is going to be a serious
problem. I would not be surprised if buying disks for this size of
storage is cheaper than tapes. A 750GB disk now costs less than 300
euro, so with a bit of redundancy 9TB will be less than 20 disks, so
less than 6,000 euro.

The other thing to consider is what kind of time scale are your
talking over. If this is, say, a 5 year project with the first 3 years
being getting equipment, workflow etc working. Then by the time you
are collecting serious data a 2TB disk will probably only be 300-500
euro. How expensive is the tape going to be? How much hassle will the
off-line storage be?

If it was my setup I would build an image server, put the pixel data
there and stuff it with disks. Keep the tapes for actual backups not
for data that might be in use.

Ian