Presentations from Library of Congress Storage Architectures Symposium 2015

Presentations from Library of Congress Storage Architectures Symposium 2015. Clifford Lynch. CNI. October 12, 2015. [PDF files]
     The presentations from the Library of Congress 2015 Symposium on Storage Architectures for Digital Collections are now available. The presentations during the symposium include:

• Technology Overview of Library of Congress Storage Architectures and also Industry
• Technical Presentations: Tape Futures, Object Storage, Fixity and Integrity
• Community Presentations
• Alternative Media Presentations: Digital Optical, DNA
• Look Back/Future Predictions of Storage

Digital Preservation Matters.

Permanent Digital Data Storage: Tape, solid-state, and discs

Permanent Digital Data Storage: An Overview. Barry M. Lunt, Matthew R. Linford, and Robert C. Davis. Brigham Young University. ISOM Conference. Received PDF August 2015. [From author's  version; not yet available on line.]
     Research shows that digital storage, whether optical, solid state, or tape, can be permanent and could potentially last over 100,000 years if permanent materials are used. The failure mechanisms are well documented. Knowing what materials to use to eliminate the failure mechanisms is the key to permanent digital storage.

Computer data storage has always been ephemeral because of the emphasis on density and speed. There has been little interest in developing a permanent way to store digital data. The authors, an engineer, chemist, and physicist, believe "that the optimal storage media does not need to be refreshed nor stored in special conditions, and that a store-and-forget approach (like printing books and storing them on shelves) is best because it is the simplest."

Permanent Storage Options and approaches

• Optical disks. The dominant failure mechanism is dye fading which can be removed by using permanent materials. 
• The media they developed (M-Discs) make permanent physical and optical marks on a standard DVD or Blu-ray format disc.
• Optical discs are a viable option for archival storage of large amounts of storage
• This permanent format is essentially guaranteed for many decades or centuries to come
• Hard disk drives are not permanent. The failure mechanisms, which are fairly well known, are predominantly mechanical. A materials approach cannot solve these problems.
• Solid-state storage. A materials approach has produced storage elements capable of lasting as long as integrated circuits; the failure rate of such circuits is measured in Failure In Time, or about 114,155 years. This is a permanent form of preservation. Their research has solved the dominant failure mechanism of early permanent programmable solid state storage.
• Permanent optical tape. Their materials-research shows that if correct materials are used, computer tape can also be permanent and the permanent tape would "match the density of LTO-5, allowing about 2 TB per cartridge. The price of the media should be equivalent to that of magnetic tape."

Optical discs, solid-state storage, and computer tape can all be made to store data permanently and last hundreds or thousands of years.

Related posts:

• How Long Is Long-Term Data Storage? 
• Dataliths vs. the digital dark age
• Millenniata Announces Results of ISO/IEC 10995 Standard Tests
• Start-up to release 'stone-like' optical disc that lasts forever

Digital Preservation Matters.

Keeping Data For A Long Time

Keeping Data For A Long Time. Tom Coughlin. Forbes. June 29, 2014.
     Keeping information for a long time has always been a challenge.  Thermodynamics doesn’t favor information lasting a long time and so to make that happen people have to spend effort and energy. Deciding how to create a long-term archive involves choosing the right storage system with the right technology under the proper environmental conditions.  This can be combined with migration and replication practices to improve the odds of keeping content useful and accessible for an extended period of time. A conference looked at digital storage for long term archiving and preservation.Some of the technologies:

• It appears conventional flash memory may not have good media archive life and should only be used for storing transitory data
• Hard disk drives are used in active archives have problems because they wear out and even if the power is turned off the data in the hard disk drive will eventually decay due to thermal erasure  
• Digital magnetic tape under low temperature/humidity is a good candidate for long-term data retention  
• Optical storage has also been used for long-term data retention and should last at least several decades. Facebook has a 1 PB prototype that should reduce the storage costs by 50% and the energy consumption by 80% of their Hard Disk storage
• Sony said their properly made archival grade optical discs should have a shelf life of 50 years.
• Hitachi Data Systems showed costs for 5 PB of content over 75 years is less than frequent tape and HDD replacement.

A lot of digital data has persistent value and so long term retention of that data is very important. It is estimated the storage for archiving and retention is currently a $3B market growing to over $7B by 2017. "Magnetic tape and optical disks provide low cost long-term inactive storage with additional latency for data access vs. HDDs due to the time to mount the media in a drive.  Thus depending upon the access requirements for an archive it may be most effective to combine two or even three technologies to get the right balance of performance and storage costs."

Related posts:

• How Long Is Long-Term Data Storage? 
• Storage Trends Around Computex 2015
• Preserving Our Digital Heritage

Digital Preservation Matters.

Fighting entropy and ISIL, one image at a time

Fighting entropy and ISIL, one image at a time. Whitney Blair Wyckoff. FedScoop. December 10, 2014.

United States security is generating so much data that traditional disk media is being pushed to its limits, requiring new technologies to safely store all that information. Hitachi Data Systems has a new technology to preserve information on disks in an infinitely expandable array. This platform uses Blu-ray XL M-DISCs that resist environmental conditions and can last for more than 1,000 years. The M-DISC optical solutions have proven survivability and durability. This system represents both "the highest reliability as well as the lowest overall cost of ownership representing superior savings in power, footprint and data reliability."

The IT can supplement magnetic storage with optical media to create a preservation tier that enables IT managers to migrate data when they want, not when the technology or media forces them.  This saves money and allows for more strategic long term planning. Flash media, magnetic tape storage, regular optical discs all are subject to deterioration and have short life spans. With additional storage servers, the amount of data that can be accessed in unlimited.

The system can preserve data for as long as necessary and access it whenever needed. Benefits provide lower operating costs through lower media migration costs, wider environmental storage requirements, migration-free technology upgrades and high media longevity and durability.

"The cost savings is stark while the possibility of data loss is virtually eliminated."

Digital Preservation Matters.

LTO-6 tape with up to 6.25TB capacity ships.

LTO-6 tape with up to 6.25TB capacity ships. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. November 26, 2012.
Tape media and drive companies have begun shipping the sixth generation of linear-tape open (LTO) technology, which like previous generation upgrades, significantly increases the capacity and data throughput capabilities for backup and archive applications.

LTO-6 cartridges can hold up to 2.5TB natively or 6.25TB of compressed data. Compared with previous generation LTO-5 drives and cartridges, the new LTO-6 cartridges more than double capacity (with compression) and offer a 40% performance boost. LTO-5 held up to 1.5TB natively and 3TB of compressed data. The LTO-5 drives had a native data transfer rate of 200MBps or up to 1TB per hour with 2:1 compression. LTO-6 tapes also include encryption and WORM (write-once, read many) capabilities that were also offered with the past two generations of LTO tape drives and media.

LTO-6 drives will provide backward compatibility with the ability to read and write LTO-5 cartridges and read LTO-4 generation cartridges.

Digital Preservation Matters.

128TB tape cartridges key to kilometer-size telescope

128TBtape cartridges key to kilometer-size telescope. Computerworld. Lucas Mearian. December 6, 2012.

In one day, the telescope's dishes will generate 10 times the network traffic produced at the same time on the global Internet. They will feed about 10 petabits of data (1 billion gigabits) per second into a central computer that will have the processing power of about 100 million of today's PCs.  The project plans to generate 1 million GB of data per day and store 300 to 1,500 petabytes (1.5 exabytes) of data per year. IBM is responsible for the data storage and they plan to use tape. "The tape will be used as a deep archive." Construction is expected to start in 2016 and take four years. The exascale supercomputer is expected to be completed by 2024.

Digital Preservation Matters.