On the Economics of Huge Requirements of the Mass Storage - A Case Study of the AGATA Project

The AGATA is a shell detector for gamma-ray spectroscopy. At the present stage of the project the AGATA collaboration is running an AGATA-demonstrator, which is a small part (only 12 Germanium crystals) of the future full AGATA spectrometer (180 crystals). The AGATA-demonstrator is producing a huge amount of raw-data with a high throughput. This paper focuses on the economics study regarding various options of data storage for the AGATA spectrometer. We discuss the raw-data storage requirements on the demonstrator and the forecasted storage size requirements for the full AGATA spectrometer. We also analyze the data communication requirements. The case study focuses in costs analysis of three options: a dedicated storage, a Grid storage and a Cloud storage service. In this manner, we explain how a huge size mass storage can be affordable, and why the costs savings depends more in the particularity of the problems than in general estimations. The results show a lower total costs for the Grid option.