At the IASA 2007 in Riga I had a presentation about the changes in handling and concepts after installing the digital domain in an archive.
As an additional phenomen I described the problems, we (the Austrian Mediathek) faced at that time with the manufacturer of our mass storage system.

Because we can't afford investing in new systems in a horrifying short period we thought about breaking out of this dependency and trying to built a mass storage system containing standard or/and open source components. Calculation models show that it should be possible to get the storage price down to an affordable amount without lacking necessary redundancy or/and security.

Meanwhile we made these ideas leading to a decision. We started a project building a mass storage system without the dependency of proprietary hard- and/or software.

In this presentation as a first step I want to describe our storage problem which probably concernes other archives as well. Then I will give a report of the proceedings in our project. Describing how far we succeeded (or not) and what actions we still plan to do.