Objectives

Storage is a central component in any preservation solution, and requires special functionalities in order to adequately address the need of a preservation system. Partners’ needs for storage may vary substantially, e.g. in required capacity, number of objects, size of a typical object, geographical locations. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the data and its usage pattern, performance needs may vary greatly.

New technological approaches are required that meet the legal, business, cost, and scalability requirements of the ‘digital age’ for long-term digital information retention. Recent advances in solutions for Storage-as-a-Service, whereby storage is supplied by a storage provider in a pay-per-use mode, raise the option to adopt new technical solutions such as Cloud Storage as the basic storage for preservation systems. Such solutions are typically not enterprise in nature. A key aspect is to identify whether such technologies can not only address the cost and scalability needs, but also become a platform for trusted storage, addressing auditability, provenance and a desired level for data integrity.

The objective of this workpackage is to identify and compare partners’ needs in terms of digital objects preservation and their available and currently used storage approaches and technical solutions. The workpackage will identify the conditions under which external storage services would be used by partners, and will furthermore compare different external storage services and their fitness to preserve digital objects in terms of cost, legal, policy and business needs.

Task 2310 Storage solutions

Compare and contrast storage solutions implemented, planned or researched by consortium partners, and others e.g. Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Data Task Force 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey [13]. Focus on dimensions such as: how long is the data preserved for, complexity of data, scalability, cost, availability, and legal regulations.

Task 2320 Evaluation and recommendation for storage solutions

This task will identify and recommend storage solutions for the long term. It will compare and survey commercial and non-commercial storage providers in terms of their cost model, validity of technology, trustworthiness, etc. For some storage providers, there is a potential risk of ‘data lock in’ since once the data is stored and managed it can be very difficult to migrate the data out and move it to a different solution. The task will investigate interoperability among different providers, and options to migrate data in and out of external providers.