I tried to work Cory, Mike and Karen’s question suggestions into the questions on the wiki. I then moved the questions we are developing for implementers onto our cloud page so that they are all in the same place for everyone to easily review. Seeing no one jump up to defend the preservation strategies question I think we can cut it. In the interest of getting substantive answers the shorter the list of questions the better. Everyone should feel free to edit the questions on the wiki or continue to discuss these revised questions over the list. 

You can find both sets of questions here: http://www.loc.gov/extranet/wiki/osi/ndiip/ndsa/index.php?title=Cloud_Presentations#Questions_for_Implementers_of_Large_Scale_Storage_and_Cloud_Services

I have uploaded all of the slides from presentations so far, so that can serve as a record of our first set of talks. For reference, I have copied the revised set of questions bellow.

Best, 
Trevor
_____________________________________________

General Questions for Cloud Service Presenters

Here we are working on a set of general questions for presenters to develop talks around.

   1. What sort of use cases is your system designed to support? What doesn't this support?
   2. What preservation standards would your system support?
   3. What resources are required to support a solution implemented in your environment?
   4. What infrastructure do you rely on?
   5. How can your system impact digital preservation activities?
   6. If we put data in your system today what systems and processes are in place so that we can get it back 10 years from now? (Take for granted a sophisticated audience that knows about multiple copies etc.)
   7. What types of materials does your system handle? (documents, audio files, video file, stills, data sets, etc) And give examples of those types in practice 

Questions for Implementers of Large Scale Storage and Cloud Services

   1. What is the particular preservation goal or challenge you need to accomplish? (for example, re-use, public access, internal access, legal mandate, etc.)
   2. What large scale storage or cloud technologies are you using to meet that challenge? Further, which service providers or tools did you consider and how did you make your choice?
   3. Specifically, what kind of materials are you preserving (text, data sets, images, moving images, web pages, etc.)
   4. How big is your collection? (In terms of number of objects and storage space required)
   5. What are your performance requirements?
   6. What storage media have you elected to use? (Disk, Tape, etc)
   7. What do you think the key advantages of the system you use?
   8. What do you think are the key problems or disadvantages your system present?
   9. What important principles informed your decision about the particular tool or service you chose to use?
  10. How frequently do you migrate from one system to another?
  11. What characteristics of the storage system(s) you use do you feel are particularly well-suited to long-term digital preservation? (High levels of redundancy/resiliency, internal checksumming capabilities, automated tape refresh, etc)
  12. What functionality or processes have you developed to augment your storage systems in order to meet preservation goals? (Periodic checksum validation, limited human access or novel use of permissions schemes)
  13. Are there tough requirements for digital preservation, e.g. TRAC certification, that you wish were more readily handled by your storage system?

-----Original Message-----
From: The NDSA infrastructure working group list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Cory Snavely
Sent: Friday, March 18, 2011 4:49 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [NDSA-INFRASTRUCTURE] Draft Large Scale/Cloud Storage Questions for Comment

I would add the following high-level technical questions, keeping in mind our goal of identifying emerging and best practices WRT the use of storage technologies:

* What characteristics of the storage system(s) you use do you feel are particularly well-suited to long-term digital preservation? (High levels of redundancy/resiliency, internal checksumming capabilities, automated tape refresh, etc)

* What functionality or processes have you developed to augment your storage systems in order to meet preservation goals? (Periodic checksum validation, limited human access or novel use of permissions schemes)

* Are there tough requirements for digital preservation, e.g. TRAC certification, that you wish were more readily handled by your storage system?

On 03/18/2011 12:28 PM, Michael J. Giarlo wrote:
> On 03/17/2011 04:47 PM, Owens, Trevor wrote:
>>
>> ==Questions for Member Implementers==
>>
>
> If the goal for the survey is to keep it short and sweet, I would like 
> to see a question added to gauge if the surveyee would be interested 
> in a follow-up survey where more in-depth questions are asked.  I have 
> a number of nitty-gritty questions I'd like to see answered in such a 
> follow-up survey:
>
>    * What type of storage do you use (NAS, SAN, DAS, etc.)?
>
>    * What sort of disks (type&  speed: SATA, 7200 RPM) do you use?
>
>    * What's the size of your environment, and how have you carved it up?
>
>    * What filesystems do you use?
>
>    * What other file systems did you consider, and why did you go with 
> the one you did? (was it because of type of data stored: size of 
> object
> - large vs many small, familiarity w/ FS, etc.)
>
>    * What tiers of storage do you have&  how have you determined them 
> (via characteristics like disk speed, RAID level, etc)?
>
>    * Do you have classifications of data? If so, how do they map to 
> different tiers of storage and backup methods?
>
>    * Are you using HSM? What vendor? How have you implemented this 
> (policies)?
>
>    * How are you using striping, mirroring, and virtualization?
>
>    * How are you handling replication?
>
>    * How do you handle backups of large-scale storage (what's the 
> backup window; how often are you doing fulls vs. diffs/incs; what's 
> your retention policy for off-site/DR copies; are backups to tape, 
> disk, or both; etc.)?
>
>    * What would you change about your storage config/architecture if 
> you had to do it all over again?
>
> -Mike
>
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