Preservation DataStores: Architecture for Preservation Aware Storage

The volumes of digital information are growing continuously and most of today's information is "born digital". Alongside this trend, business, scientific, artistic and cultural needs require much of this information to be kept for decades, centuries or longer. The convergence of these two trends implies the need for storage systems that support very long term preservation for digital information. We describe Preservation DataStores, a novel storage architecture to support digital preservation. It is a layered architecture that builds upon open standards, along with the OAIS, XAM and OSD standards. This new architecture transforms the logical information-object, a basic concept in preservation systems, into a physical storage object. The transformation allows more robust and optimized implementations for preservation aware storage. The architecture of Preservation DataStores is being developed as an infrastructure component of the CASPAR project and will be tested in the context of this project using scientific, cultural, and artistic data.