You know, there is nothing inherent in using cloud storage for a known
quantity of data increasing at a predictable rate that necessarily provides
more security, and it may cost more. You describe the sort of situation
where, assuming that you have the infrastructure to support the storage
facility, you may be better off building your own redundant facility as did
the Boston TV station WGBH (Courtney Michael, courtney_michael at wgbh.org ,
might be a good contact), or as some schools (Columbia is one--don't
remember who else is involved) in the Northeast have done.
Likewise, Boston College is involved in an archives preservation effort
through MetaArchive.org with half a dozen institutions that share redundant
data centers among themselves. They do use the cloud to host the
coordinating facility, for convenience, but the data centers are all pretty
conventional. Where small organizations such as mine pay about
$1.80/GB/year, the BU's consortium is paying about $1/GB/year. Bill
Donovan, BC's Digital Preservation Manager, is a good contact person -
bill.donovan at bc.edu donovawf at bc.edu. The basic MetaArchive mantra is:
LOCKSS software is used to operate a network of 'preservation servers'; All
collections replicated on 6+ caches at geographically dispersed
locations; Preservation, not just back-ups.
Clouds, public or private, are most useful when you need to quickly
provision server services, or when bandwidth/data needs may change rapidly.
(This can include the services related to more stable systems; i.e., look at
the cloud-based solution artbabble.org sets up to process video as it is
submitted.)
Hope this helps,
ari
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 8:11 PM, Ballate, Leo lballate at sfmoma.org wrote:
Greetings to all,
SFMOMA is planning a $500m building and endowment expansion during the next
four to five years. This expansion will involve, among other things, a
significant construction project as well as temporary administrative
offices and off site art storage facilities. In the context of this
expansion, we are proposing a private cloud solution in Sacramento (Raging
Wire) for backup/disaster recovery and business continuity. Currently SFMOMA
has about 20TB of data (combination of file system, virtual machines,
databases, etc.) which is growing exponentially. I was wondering if any of
you are using cloud based services for backup? If so, which service
providers are you using?
If you do use a cloud based service for backup, how does the service work
with your disaster recovery and business continuity strategy (RTO, RPO)?
Additionally, what is the pricing model for the services you use and what
kind of bandwidth does it require?
I realize this is a fairly broad inquiry, but any information you can pass
on would be extremely useful for our planning. Thanks in advance for your
feedback.
Best,
Leo Ballate
IT Director
SFMOMA
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
tel: 415-357-4145
fax: 415-947-1145
www.sfmoma.org
Check out our current podcast feature at http://www.sfmoma.org/podcasts
and Explore Modern Art at http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/explore
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