A 4 Gb partition currently houses the ETD collection. For back-ups SCP has a Sun 8mm Ultra Wide SCSI tape drive that takes 170m tapes with a compressed storage capacity of 40Gb. Disk Space Scalability is important so that drives can be added as needed. Redundant drives for backups or mirroring are a plus. Memory Have enough memory to process the work load, i.e. to handle dozens of cgi posts and thousands of hits each day.
Memory is especially valuable if the same machine is used to index the collection.
A fast network connection and robust ethernet card are also plusses. The server itself should run a mature and growing operating system, one for which there are commercial and public resources. A modern version of UNIX is strongly recommended. Web Server Run a web server which is robust, fairly easy to configure, and for which there is a sizable knowledge-base among the online community. Any web server which is to be used should work well with scripts, and should have powerful, flexible, and easily implemented security.