Archiving and preservation for research environments

ARCHIVER featured in Computerweekly.com

24 March 2021

On the 3rd of March 2021, ARCHIVER has been showcased in a dedicated article on the technology news website Computerweekly.com covering the issues, challenges and trends facing today’s IT leaders.

João Fernandes, Archiver project coordinator, interviewed by Antony Adshead, has introduced the project and its objective to provide petabyte-scale storage for a wide variety of research and analytics use cases for the scientific partners involved, considering that the scalability of the technology is a high priority because the expected eventual capacity will be in the tens of petabytes: in the prototype phase of the project, the system will ingest data at rates of up to 100TB a day.

It’s not just about storing bits, but also about intellectual control of the data, so preserving what has been done with the data previously, who by, and keeping the documentation and the software” he said "We have about 10 major use cases. Some are purely about data preservation. Some are about keeping a second copy, but also about being able to reproduce the analysis. Others, such as those connected to genome work, involve data that is increasing by 50% a year and decisions will need to be made about where data is cached to allow access to it.

The article highlights the three designs chosen for the second prototyping stage, worth €4.8m and lasting eight months: T-Systems, Libnova and, in particular, Arkivum, each of which will be evaluated before the project moves to its next phase and to multi-petabyte scale in 2022.

 

Read the full article on the Computerweekly.com website