Dr. Kirkby --

I support about thirty or so UNIX servers (Solaris, AIX, Linux) that 
represent the development, testing, and production environments for 
the electronic resources of the University of Wisconsin at Madison 
Libraries.  I started using Amanda 2.4.x about two years ago to do 
backups on these systems, originally using a collection of 
miscellaneous resources (hosts, holding disks, and tape drives) left 
over from previous backup strategies.

We're just now finishing a re-implementation of the whole system that
will give us 1 TB of capacity on our primary (and now, finally,
dedicated) Amanda host.  We use a modestly-priced Linux host, coupled
with 500 GB of IDE-to-SCSI holding disk, and five Overland LibraryPro
AIT-3 autoloaders.  We configure for at least fourteen days of mixed
full and incremental backups (level zeroes every three days), plus at
least six weeks of level zero offsites.  Cost of the entire system,
including tape media and three years of onsite next-day support for
all hardware, was $60k.  Doing it again, shaving support costs and
with recent pricing changes, I think I could probably do it for $50k
even.

By comparison, I did a three-year cost workup for buying backups on 
our central storage solution (Tivoli-based).  Even assuming low 
initial capacity, ramping up gradually to 1 TB across the three 
years, the cost was easily $200k+, for a system that (in my opinion) 
would be almost useless to us in a true disaster-recovery scenario, 
as opposed to occasional file restores when someone fumble-fingers an 
"rm -rf".

I have been told that I didn't allow for the cost of my time to
implement and babysit our system;  but from watching one of my
colleagues struggle with our Tivoli implementation, I'm not sure it
makes that much of a difference.  And that same colleague has now
approached me about buying some of the excess time and capacity on our
Amanda system, so we'll do some cost-recovery there as well.

-mgs