Many research groups at UiO require relatively large storage volumes, and for the time being, it is clearly cheapest to establish this at UiO, and simplest for a number of reasons. The basic premise is that expenses should be covered by the environment with regard to procurement, and that UiO's established storage solutions (file, block, object) should be used primarily. If funding is provided by strategic coordination groups, solutions 1 or 2 should be chosen, otherwise the solution needs to be handled on a case by case basis, as an exception.
The primary choice is to pay for expansion of the IT department's central storage solutions; as of 2024, these are Hitachi block storage, IBM file storage, and Cloudian object storage. Such an investment automatically covers backup costs, and in the case of choosing the file storage service, it also allows for tiering to tape (a greener and cheaper cold storage of data that can be automatically retrieved to disk). There are no operating costs.
Alternatively, one can choose to have the IT department purchase RAID solutions, but then one must also cover the costs for backup, as a purely capital investment in RAID shelves does not cover backup costs. The RAID shelves must be placed with the IT department and operated by the IT department. Any additional operating costs will also apply. By investing in simple RAID shelves, one must understand the technical and functional disadvantages (currently, for example, no snapshots or tiering-to-tape) this provides versus the advantage in price, and must also consider that backup costs will apply. From experience, we have had few problems with RAID solutions, but they have a tendency to cause significant issues the few times they crash.