The hundred-year archive is no longer a hypothetical discussion.
With the advent of regulations like the
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act (HIPAA), which specify that medical establishments must
keep data for years after a patient dies, having to keep
information -- and even keep it on hand -- for a century is an
issue experts said some users will be facing in the very near
future.
"Think about the flip side of HIPAA," said Tom Cook, CEO of
Permabit Inc., in a presentation at the Storage Networking World
(SNW) conference in Orlando, Fla., earlier this month called The
Thousand Year Archive. "Right now you have to keep data, but
there isn't yet any regulation around [saying] how well you have to
be able to access it. That's coming.
"In the near future," Cook continued, "if I'm wheeled into an
emergency room on a gurney, there will be a regulation saying that
the proper information will have to be available and brought forth
to save my life."
As a result, Cook said, companies in industries affected by
regulations like HIPAA, the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the upcoming
updates to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, "should start
thinking about data in terms of centuries."
"Even if you think in terms of decades," said Steve Remsing,
senior systems administrator for research and development at a
major Midwestern chemical company, who asked that the company not
be named, "Even on the personal level -- people are going to want
to be able to access digital baby pictures when the kids are in
college."
A two-fold problem
A frequently discussed issue with long-term archiving is
software compatibility over long periods of time -- what happens
when no one remembers what "Centera" means, but there's still
terabyte upon terabyte of disk stored in Centera format? While the
debate rages about those issues, the issue of long-lasting physical
media is often overlooked. Current digital media formats are far
more advanced in the short term, but in terms of readability over
vast stretches of time, they've still got nothing on the Rosetta
Stone.
One by one, according to Remsing, the different formats can be
scratched off the hundred-year archive list for physical reasons.
It's difficult to put
RAID on tape and difficult to migrate
between formats on any form of removable media, whether tape or
optical. Disk is flimsy in the long run and requires power and
cooling.
Holographic disk a possibility
One company already "thinking in centuries" is Warner Bros.
Entertainment Inc. The entertainment giant is currently working
toward a concept of archiving its films digitally, a project that
would require a capacity approaching 3 exabytes (EB). The film
archives are currently stored on film stock, which will easily last
a century, but audio tracks for all the films are another matter.
Those digital sound files are currently stored on a combination of
optical storage -- DVDR jukeboxes --and tape from various vendors,
according to Wendy Aylsworth, vice president (VP) of technology and
Steven Anastasi, VP of media archiving for Warner Bros.
Right now, according to Anastasi, the software and hardware in
the sound archive must be updated every seven to 10 years. Most
recently, the archive was converted from the DAT tape it used in
the 1980s and 1990s to DVDR and
Linear-Tape Open (LTO). Within another
decade, the media will need to be replaced again.
"We're pushing very hard with companies that make optical media
to figure out what technologies might last at least 50 years and
targeting up to 100 years," Aylsworth said. At the very least, "our
goal is not to have to replace technology more often than every 25
years."
Right now the best hope, Warner Bros. officials said, is in a
form of optical storage known as holographic disk storage, also
known as holographic versatile disk (HVD). This uses a multilayered
substrate read by two separate lasers, meaning it can pack more
bits onto the media. Current optical media has a density of one bit
per laser "pulse." Manufacturers of holographic disks are hoping to
eventually achieve 600,000 bits per pulse.
"It's just a matter of companies agreeing on a format,"
Aylsworth said.
"Our hope is that it will soon be recognized that this isn't
just an entertainment industry problem," Anastasi said. "It also
applies to the medical and high-tech market, anyone who protects
high-res images. We're trying to get everyone aware."
"Holographic disk could totally change the equation in this
space," Remsing agreed. "It would provide physical write protects,
since it's an optical medium. It has good density because it writes
and reads from multiple layers of substrate."
Currently, Toshiba, Maxell, InPhase Technologies and Hitachi
Ltd. manufacture holographic media. InPhase and Maxell announced
their intentions to offer a 300 GB version by the end of this
year.
What about
MAID?
"I'm not convinced optical is the answer," said Laura DuBois,
research director of storage software at IDC. "There's been a lot
of movement away from that medium lately."
Instead, DuBois said the future was probably in spinning disk --
but infrequently spinning disk -- a new way of managing disk that
would save on power and cooling over long periods, but allow the
information to stay accessible. This future medium, DuBois said,
would be something like MAID pioneered by Copan Systems, which
spins
SATA disks down within the array, "waking"
them periodically in order to maintain their viability in a
process Copan calls "disk aerobics."
The problem with this format is that the disk aerobics still
need to be performed too often -- MAID currently is designed around
archiving for weeks, months, even a few years but not around
decades and centuries. The platters themselves would also need to
undergo physical changes for this to work, according to users.
"The lubricant on disks becomes a nice glue if it sits idle for
too long," Remsing said. "There's also something called bit rot --
disks today aren't physically built to last hundreds of years."