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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.

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.