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Curation Costs Exchange

Understanding and comparing digital curation costs to support smarter investments

  1. Understand your costs
  2. Summary of Cost Models
  3. NASA-CET

NASA Cost Estimating Tool (NASA-CET)


Creator and Funding
Developed for NASA by SGT (Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies Inc.).
Status
The first version of CET (version 1) was published in 2004. The newest version available (version 2.4) is from September 2008.
Purpose
Estimating life cycle costs for ground data centres activated to improve budgets for NASA missions.
Information assets
Space data - typically multi-dimensional data sets.
Activities
Ingest, Data Management, Archival Storage, Access, Administration.
Resources
96 distinct descriptors such as staff salaries, system purchase cost, COTS software license, archive media, inflation, volume, automation level.
Time
Past, Present, Future - for a 7 to 10 year time scale reflecting normal data processing time period for missions.
Variables
Labour salaries (6 types),capital cost (building space, hardware and software, clients, servers, databases, storage, 'archive system'), migration frequency, number of assets.
Type of tool
Analysis, estimation and review of estimation. Implemented in MS Excel Spreadsheet using Visual Basic (VBA).
Availability of tool
The CET tool, user guide, technical description etc is available for download.

Further reading

  • Fontaine, K., Hunolt, G., Booth, A. and Banks, M., Observations on Cost Modelling and Performance Measurement of Long Term Archives, in PV2007 Conference Proceedings, 2007.
  • Hunolt, G., Booth, B. and Banks, M., Cost Estimation Toolkit (CET) Users' Guide, Version 2.4, 2008 (available as part of the CET software package).