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I maintain an 8 TB file server for this purpose.  It's a Ubuntu server 
with  10 1 TB drives in a RAID 6 configuration.  It's mountable from any 
of our microscopes and from most computers at the university.  It is not 
designed for long term storage - in fact, because the data rate is a few 
TB/year, we are implementing automatic deletion of files older than one 
year, and requiring the end users to deal with long term data storage.  
It's mainly there to facilitate moving data around.

Once you have automated microscopes, you can generate pretty impressive 
quantities of data - we have one user doing multiposition timelapse with 
Z-stacks who generates ~200GB / night.

I'm happy to answer additional questions.

Best,
Kurt

On 2/14/2012 7:45 AM, Peter Owens wrote:
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> To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
> http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
> *****
>
> Dear all,
>
> I have been searching for ideas regarding  what would be a suitable solution
> for data storage for our microscopy facility (www.imaging.nuigalway.ie). The
> first thought on this are to providing a data storage server that would be
> networked to all microscopes (currently 10 standalone systems , scaling to
> 20 instruments in the future). We can cater for multi channel time lapse
> live cell imaging so experiment  data sizes may go to the order of GB but
> the norm is smaller data sizes.
>
> I have a concern over upload download access speeds, security, what is the
> right amount of storage that will cover our needs.
>
> Does anyone out there have any suggestions / recommendations on how to go
> about specifiying this system?
>
> Thanks
>
> Peter Owens, National University of Ireland Galway.
>
>
>