Physical Media

The PDS Management Council (MC) approved the formation of a Physical Media Working Group (PMWG) to address alleged PDS wide challenges associated with the use of physical media. The PMWG solicited the assistance of the Nodes (and others) to:

• Leverage their operational experience
• Discover what challenges/problems exist
• Quantify the extent of the problems
• Correlate “problems” into system-wide solutions

The WG created a survey, “DRAFT QUESTIONNAIRE FOR SAMPLING NODE EXPERIENCES WITH PHYSICAL MEDIA”, in an attempt to answer the above issues. Each Node (and NSSDC) was asked to designate a participant to be responsible for completing the survey.The responses are captured in Survey Results.

The PMWG is currently tasked to address the PDS-wide challenges associated with the use of physical media, to recommend reliable media for use, and to develop mechanisms for media verification.

Working Group

Working group members include: Christopher Isbell (IMG), Bill Harris (PPI), Ed Grayzeck, Mike Martin, Dan Crichton (EN), Emily Law (EN), Ron Joyner (EN)

Milestones

Near-term milestones include:

• Help develop an integrated storage strategy, including storage service, which can take advantage of PDS 2010 after deployment.
• Benchmark different data movement techniques and to set storage thresholds of different storage architectures.

Current Status

Conducted a PDS wide node survey in July 2010 to:

• Characterize storage infrastructure of PDS Nodes
• Determine storage technologies
• Ascertain increase in data holdings & accessibility
• Ascertain mirroring / backup strategies
• Share ‘Lessons learned’

A presentation highlighting the survey results was made to the MC at the August 2010 MC face to face meeting. At the November 2010 MC face to face meeting, ‘Storage Technologies Discussion’ presentation was made.

Historical Documents and Resources

The historical milestones and meetings regarding the Physical Media Working Group are provided below in reverse chronological order:

• Amazon Cloud Storage (20101215) (PDF)
• PMWG Nodes Storage Survey (20100601)
• PMWG RAID Node Survey Summary (20090626)
• SDSC Phase I Test Report (20071019)
• SDSC Phase I Test Plan (20071009)
• PMWG Repository Survey (20070812)
• PMWG Media Test (20070319)
• Physical Media Use Cases DRAFT (20061009)
• Physical Media MC Update (20060726)
• PDS Physical Media Survey Summary (20060620)
• PPI’s Media Findings by Todd King
• Checksum and Forensic Tracking – by Todd King

MC Presentations:

• PMWG Storage Technologies Discussion (20101101)
• PMWG Storage Survey (20100807)
• PMWG SDSC and iRods2.0 – Node Results and Recommendations (20090204)
• PMWG SDSC and iRods2.0 (20090107)
• PMWG – Archive Integrity Reports (200807)
• PMWG_MC_F2F_presentation (20061129)

Resources:

• Physical Media Resources by M.Martin
• Conservation Online – Resouces for Conservation Professionals
• Government Information Preservation Working Group
• Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA)