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By Leslie T. O’Neill Massive volumes of photographs and videos, scanned document images and other files are being created today, and they must be archived in a way that protects them and makes them easily searched for and accessible to large groups of users—forever. It is risky to use proprietary, closed source archive technology for this type of fixed-content archive because the data may become marooned on an archive “island” if the vendor leaves the business, the archiving organisation loses key technical personnel, the product is significantly altered or newer technology supersedes it. On the other hand, open source software can help prevent archived fixed content from being stranded in this way because its source code is always publicly available. It is even more attractive when you consider that open source code is easy on the budget and can reduce technical complexity. All of these advantages are increasingly important to all organisations, especially universities and government agencies, that have massive amounts of content that they must archive, tag with metadata, preserve for the ages and keep available to millions of users.
A Free and Open ArchiveIn addition to eliminating the risk of vendor lock-in, Project Honeycomb makes object storage extensible and affordable. The StorageTek 5800 system is the only integrated storage system built on open source software that is capable of tagging and retrieving files with metadata, which makes it significantly faster to find specific content; this is a critical feature when your organisation’s users trawl through hundreds of millions of files. A fixed-content object can be archived with rich metadata; for example, searchable tags of each file might include a description of a photograph or video, its resolution, the date the original was created and more. Because Sun has open-sourced the core engine of the StorageTek 5800, you can use it to store and retrieve fixed objects as well as tag and search them. Get StartedYou can start building an object store for your organisation’s library today. Here’s how:
Leslie T. O’Neill writes about Sun technology and was the Test Centre Managing Editor and Special Projects Editor at InfoWorld magazine. |
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