NDSA:WGBH Responses

WGBH Responses to Implementations of Large Scale Storage Architectures

1. What is the particular preservation goal or challenge you need to accomplish? (for example, re-use, public access, internal access, legal mandate, etc.)
   • We need to preserve for re-use by our own institution, for public and research access, for cultural heritage, potential revenue, and institutional history.
2. What large scale storage or cloud technologies are you using to meet that challenge? Further, which service providers or tools did you consider and how did you make your choice?
   • For digital: Open Text Artesia DAM system with a Storage Tek SL8500 robotic tape library making 2 LTO4 copies, one held off site. 20 TB of spinning disk for nearline storage. However, also maintaining various other content mgmt system and streaming servers for access. In some cases keeping materials on cd’s and digital tape for physical storage. 10 years ago there were few enterprise wide systems that seemed sustainable and to fit our requirements for management of video files. Other like companies had abandoned various vendors they had been using. This one seemed the most robust and able to be developed. We also forged a business partnership with them to help with development resources.
3. Specifically, what kind of materials are you preserving (text, data sets, images, moving images, web pages, etc.)
   • text, images, moving images, audio, web materials – in some cases code for interactive games, documents
4. How big is your collection? (In terms of number of objects and storage space required)
   • analog – over 750,000 current digital: 156, 510 and growing with each new program created.
5. What are your performance requirements?
   • Major access 5 days per week during normal business hours, occasional need for 24/7 access. Need to be able to download video essence files within an hour for some materials.
6. What storage media have you elected to use? (Disk, Tape, etc)
   • LTO4 tape
7. What do you think the key advantages of the system you use?
   • We didn’t have to build it. Web based system. Works well for documents and still images. Security and permissions pretty capable. Automatically creates proxies for streaming and story boards longer video files. Adds key technical metadata. Ability to have parent and child relationship and versioning, although enticing at first, have found need it less than anticipated in original requirements.
8. What do you think are the key problems or disadvantages your system present?
   • We didn’t build it so doesn’t quite fulfill all our needs easily. Export of metadata although represents relationships doesn’t quite give enough information about relationships of objects. Exporting essence video files is slow. No transcoding ability for exports or imports of video files. Interface hard to customize. Ingest of video files through custom developed application – so doesn’t migrate easily with overall system upgrades. Although allows for relationships in a parent-child hierarchy configuration, doesn’t allow more complicated relationships. No check sum validation – we need to build ourselves. Indexing is finicky. Expensive license fee to maintain with little services benefits.
9. What important principles informed your decision about the particular tool or service you chose to use?
   • Sustainable vendor that would be around for sometime. Enterprise wide system. Felixble, customizable. Ability to ingest many file types.
10. How frequently do you migrate from one system to another?
    • Only for major upgrades in Open Text /Artesia application. Say every 3 years?
11. 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)
    • Duplicate copies able to be stored in different locations. Bit integrity.
12. 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)
    • Working on periodic checksum validation.
13. Are there tough requirements for digital preservation, e.g. TRAC certification, that you wish were more readily handled by your storage system?
    • Yes – we would like to be TRAC compliant with check sum validation and periodic checks of tape.