1,000-year storage?
by Pete Gerr on March 5, 2010
Tadahiro Kuroda, an electrical engineering professor at Keio University in Japan has proposed a novel method for ultra-longterm digital storage. Kuroda calls his invention the “Digital Rosetta Stone” (DRS), which is nearly as evocative a name as are the possibilities his invention may hold. With all the information we’re creating today, we need a more suitable and sustainable method for preserving all these valuable assets. Fortunately, for customers with the most demanding archive, retention, and controlled disposition requirements, HDS has HCP here today.
Hard disk drives (HDDs) can store data reliably for “years” (might be 3, 5, 10). However, compliance regulations in some cases, mandate that records must be kept for “decades”. For example, rules governing US medical records (be they electronic or paper-based), in Massachusetts, where I reside, mandate that, “Hospitals or clinics licensed by the Department of Mental Health shall maintain patient records for at least 30 years after discharge or last contact of patient.“
So, if I live another 30, 40, 50 years my records must be maintained for at least 60 more years - probably longer. Immutably. Reliably. Available for (reasonably) quick recall. That’s why I say “technology itself is merely a means to achieve some other end.”
(C) Property of Keio University 2009
While Kuroda’s academic exploration might bear fruit for commercial markets someday, in the not-too-distant future, we will need massively scalable (think Zettabytes), long-term (think centuries), immutable digital archives. Oh, and make the nugget of information I need retrievable in almost realtime, please. Of course it’s got to be machine-readable today, tomorrow, and in a decade’s time. I’d also like to serve up my latest MRI records on my iPhone please while standing in my doctor’s office. I’m sure there’s an app for that.
This is where solutions like the Hitachi Content Platform can help today. HCP can start small but scales up to 40PB (1 Petabyte = 1,000 Terabytes) using today’s latest HDD technology (also by Hitachi). It’s built upon open, standard interfaces offering the most protected investment of its type in the market. It’s simple to configure and deploy yet intelligent enough to eliminate duplication and provide compression at the individual object level.
One of my favorite sayings is, “The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” Perhaps I can extend that to, “The journey to a 1,000-year archive starts with a single HCP.” I think that’s got a nice ring to it.
After all, while the DRS may someday offer reliable retention for digital records up to a millennia, customers today face real challenges in terms of archival, retention, recovery that must be addressed; and done so efficiently, flexibly, and with some considerations for the long-term. HCP is a big step forward in the right direction on a very long journey to a 1,000 archive.
Comments (2 )
DanB on 22 Mar 2010 at 3:47 pm
I would suggest that the journey to a 1,000 year archive starts not with one specific piece of technology, but rather with the initial step in an overall information management strategy. Archiving is a complete lifecycle, of which storage is just a singular component.
Pete Gerr on 23 Mar 2010 at 11:14 am
Hi Dan, and thanks very much for reading and commenting. I completely agree with you, and your suggestion, and integrated archiving strategy that includes the storage media (HDD, Flash, etc) and the information or content management software to coordinate attributes like retention periods, access permissions, disposition periods is how HDS approaches the challenge. I suppose another way of looking at the challenge is to say, “archived or retained data is only as good as your ability to access, retrieve, and use the data when you need to”. The physical act of archiving is more about the media or hardware we use, the access / retrieval is all about the software. Independently, neither are much use.
