Archive storage system design for long-term storage of massive amounts of data

Abstract

A dramatic shift is underway in how organizations use computer storage. This shift will have a profound impact on storage system design. The requirement for storage of traditional transactional data is being supplemented by the necessity to store information for long periods. In 2005, a total of 2,700 petabytes of storage was allocated worldwide for information that required long-term retention, and this amount is expected to grow to an estimated 27,200 petabytes by 2010. In this paper, we review the requirements for long-term storage of data and describe an innovative approach for developing a highly scalable and flexible archive storage system using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. Such a system is expected to be capable of preserving data for decades, providing efficient policy-based management of the data, and allowing efficient search and access to data regardless of data content or location.

Managing Data Retention Policies at Scale

“…Many solutions exist for record retention [5,17,20,4], but none has been demonstrated at the scale we envision. Furthermore, two key concerns have not been addressed in existing solutions.…”

“…Data retention belongs to a class of data policies called action policies that specify what to do under the current situation [18]. We believe that other policies such as data backup, data archiving, and data migration [4,5], can be expressed in action policies and enforced similarly.…”

Measurement for Improving the Design of Commodity Archival Storage Tiers

“…The use of disk-based storage for archival storage tiers is growing in popularity [5], [8]. Bradshaw et al [8] concludes that commodity components, also known as COTS components, can be used to construct an archival storage tier that is a low-cost, scalable and flexible.…”

“…Bradshaw et al [8] concludes that commodity components, also known as COTS components, can be used to construct an archival storage tier that is a low-cost, scalable and flexible. He also states that the effective use of data storage/retrieval policies enables archival storage tiers to efficiently locate and retrieve files thus providing good performance, even with commodity components.…”

Content Management as a Service—Financial Archive Cloud

“…Included in the life cycle management features (of the block storage devices, not to be confused with the document life cycle management which is performed at the higher software layers) is the capability of GPFS to remove disks from GPFS file systems while the data is online, as well as adding new storage to existing file systems. This is an essential manageability feature to ensure continuous operation within a single namespace for the many years that objects live in the Archive Cloud [4].…”