Newbie needs tips on Mac RAID systems for DAM

Hi group wondering if anyone would mind sharing their knowledge, I am researching DAM for a client of mine I own a digital tech business (photography connected front and back end) I have been asked to provide DAM services off site for a photographer/video director. He has about 10 terabytes and would like me to have a T1 line, off site back up, and web access for himself and his clients to their respective files as well me having the adm. privileges if of a problem with any of his clients. He already told me I will be needing to hire an IT person so if any of you have experience in this arena and are near LAX in Ca. send an email to me at info at ladigitaltech.com If anyone has any tips other than the classes via apple or the two 10.4 books on listed on another post I'd love to hear from you. This might be a too daunting of task since I am not an IT person at all and I do not know Apache, or much web related code. I have already figured it will cost around 18k to get this going, but I would love to hear from you online or offline. Thank you to all who can reply best David

I can't address all your points but off the top of my head I would place the very base hardware price tag at a minimum of $30K plus infrastructure, back-up and T1 installation and costs. Since a fully loaded XRAID holds 7TB to support 10 TB you will need _at least_ 1 fully loaded XRAID and another half of one. And that point you might as well go with 2 fully loaded and do RAID 5 to get redundancy - but that doesn't leave you much expansion room. You will also an Xserve to run web, ftp and share the files - that's 2x 13K and 1x 4K (at least) so that's $30,000 without even trying and you're very close to the limitations of your storage. If he wants to add another 2TB of images you're committed to more hardware. And reliable back-up of these kinds of file sizes is not a simple matter or cheap either. You might be able to get away with a 7 tape loader Magnum or something but to do it right the 21 tape 221 LTO FC will require a fibre channel switch at 5K and is another $16K and $3K in tape costs just to get started.
I would place a spitball estimate of this project at a minimum raw cost of $60-65K and then you have service contracts, IT, programming and continuing tape costs - and in there somewhere I suspect you want to make some money too. I think the first thing you need to do is find a reliable IT guy to cost out a reliable estimate for you that includes both up front and continuing costs and then you would need to mark-up and pad that estimate until you feel confident you will make a profit on all this and pass that onto your client.
Tread carefully before committing to anything without taking this step.
Good luck,
=Tod

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