NDSA:Thursday, July 28, 2011
Notes for NDSA Infrastructure Working Group Call: Thursday, July 28, 2011
- Andrea Goethals
- Cal Lee
- Dean Farrell
- Gene Hurr
- Karen Cariani
- Micah Altman
- Robert Cartolano
- Trevor Owens
- Jane Mandelbaum
- Mike Smorul
- Joe Pawletko
- Priscilla Caplan
- Oya Rieger
Action Items
- COB next Tuesday (Aug 2nd): Everyone: Add comments and questions on the storage document Google doc. Add your name and affiliation to the bottom of the document if you would like to be noted as a contributor.
- Early-mid August: Trevor: Clean up the document
- Early-mid August: Priscilla: Draft definitional paragraph
- Early-mid August: Micah: Draft matrix for paper
- Late August: Trevor: Draft targeted survey for NDSA membership to get descriptive statistics for document.
- Early September: Document vetted to be shared as pre-reading for the LC storage meeting
Recap on NDSA Make it Work Conference
The call started with a recap of the workshop on the storage document. For those not attending, at one point I counted 35 people simultaneously editing and commenting on the document. At the end of all of that our document is a bit of a mess. It would be ideal if anyone who added notes could go back and try and make sure that those notes would make sense to someone who was not in the conversation at your table. Please add, refine, and comment on the current document before COB next Tuesday. Here is the link to the editable document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KlyqO0VfsY6twL6d9MUHxIiVZUQTh2XihtI-v12Fg0g/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=CI2RoKcO
Next steps for Large Scale Storage Document
Jane Mendelbaum from the Library of Congress joined us on our call and discussed the Library of Congress’s storage meeting. The group agreed to share the resulting document as pre-reading for the storage meeting in September. The meeting is primarily technical people from vendors and from institutions to talk through technical parts of storage issues. For reference, information about and talks from last year’s meeting “Designing Storage Architectures for Preservation Collections” can be found here. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/events/other_meetings/storage10/index.html
We plan to have a revised version of this document to share as pre-reading for the 2011 meeting and will likely do a panel about this work. Trevor will start on reworking the document after COB next Tuesday, so please add notes and comments before next Tues.
Creation of a Matrix for Storage Document
We have had a few discussions about creating a decision tree based on this work, presumably a decision tree about choosing storage systems. On the call we decided it would be more valuable to create a matrix that lays out some of the pros and cons with different choices and approaches as outlined in the document and responses to the questionnaire. So, if you have this type of system these are the strengths it will have and types of concerns you will have. If you have a tape based system you will have these issues – compare and contrast on local disk/local tape, commercial cloud and non third party clouds depending on performance and long term needs. Micah is going to take a crack at this and it will be included in the document.
Development of survey to supplement the document
There was general consensus that a targeted survey of the membership to get some descriptive statistics to back up or complicate some of the claims we are making in the document. Trevor volunteered to take a first pass at developing a set of survey questions which he will share with the group. Micah offered to take a second pass at the survey. After that we will share it with the mailing list for general comment. We set a target to have launch the survey in November.
Nailing down our terms and definitions
We briefly returned to the issues with definitions of terms. That is the relationship between storage system, preservation system, storage architecture, storage management system, and IT infrastructure. Fuzzy area your preservation system is part of a preservation system and your IT infrastructure. Pricilla talked through a few concrete examples where she used these terms and volunteered to put together a paragraph articulating what it is we have been talking about. She will share this paragraph with the list for everyone to weigh in on tweak and revise. Ultimately it will play an important role in orienting the very different kinds of individuals in our membership, and the communities our membership comes from, to the document we are drafting.
Next topics after storage
The infrastructure also hosted a workshop on Open Source software projects sustainability models at the NDSA meeting. It was a good discussion, which if there is interest, could serve as the basis of a next project. We will likely think about and select a next project in November or December. So start thinking about something that you would like the group to tackle.