NDSA:Open Ended Large Scale Storage Questions
Following on the initial infrastructure working group NDSA:Cloud Presentations the group decided we wanted to more deeply explore our own approaches to large scale storage systems. To this end, we developed the following set of questions and had nine of the NDSA member organizations respond to them in depth. This information was used to inform the NDSA:Infrastructure Storage Survey.
Questions for Member Institution Implementations of Large Scale Storage Architectures
- What is the particular preservation goal or challenge you need to accomplish? (for example, re-use, public access, internal access, legal mandate, etc.)
- What large scale storage or cloud technologies are you using to meet that challenge? Further, why did you choose these particular technologies?
- Specifically, what kind of materials are you preserving (text, data sets, images, moving images, web pages, etc.)
- How big is your collection? (In terms of number of objects and storage space required)
- What are your performance requirements? Further, why are these your particular requirements?
- What storage media have you elected to use? (Disk, Tape, etc) Further, why did you choose these particular media?
- What do you think the key advantages of the system you use?
- What do you think are the key problems or disadvantages your system present?
- What important principles informed your decision about the particular tool or service you chose to use?
- How frequently do you migrate from one system to another? Further, what is it that prompts you to make these migrations?
- What characteristics of the storage system(s) you use do you feel are particularly well-suited to long-term digital preservation? (High levels of redundancy/resiliency, internal checksumming capabilities, automated tape refresh, etc)
- What functionality or processes have you developed to augment your storage systems in order to meet preservation goals? (Periodic checksum validation, limited human access or novel use of permissions schemes)
- Are there tough requirements for digital preservation, e.g. TRAC certification, that you wish were more readily handled by your storage system?