When I started writing a paper last year about the advantages of using a technology like XAM for the long-term curation of digital artifacts, I was looking forward to hearing feedback on the recommendation.
Well, last week Craig Randall forwarded me an article highlighting the fact that others are arriving at the exact same conclusion on their own.
In the above-referenced article, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, who covers Enterprise Content Management technologies and practices, duly notes that the work the SNIA has done on the XAM proposal provides strong benefits in an ECM environment where document preservation is a paramount requirement.
The thrust of the article is that XAM is an excellent “contract” when it comes to an API between archival applications and storage systems. It has strong “longevity” characteristics when it comes to the ability to seamlessly migrate archived content from one system to another over the course of many years.
The article ends with a call for customers to add XAM to the list of request for proposals (RFPs) to content technology providers.
While Pelz-Sharpe focuses on the XAM benefit of “migration between storage devices”, I’d also like to point out a few more XAM benefits that augment the point:
- XAM is defined for massively scalable object storage in a flat object space. Traditional archiving applications that use file systems often experience a high cost of ownership in regards to maintaining said file system. XAM devices offer the potential to hide file system storage nuances (if the XAM device uses a file system at all), and minimize or remove high administration burdens.
- In a similar vein, some archiving applications that utilize underlying file systems will store hard-coded absolute pathnames to content. This can result in a rigid, inflexible file system structure that is very difficult to change (or migrate). Archiving applications that use XAM must reference location-independent names instead. These names are known as XUIDs.
- Archiving applications often use databases as well as file systems. Content and its related metadata can become “split” between the DB and FS. This split increases the chance of losing the “unity” between a given piece of content and its related metadata. XAM technology acts as a “paper clip” which permanently binds these two (or more) items together.
- Many times archival applications need to specify retention periods. XAM has built in support for retention. When an archival applications stores content to a XAM device it can mandate the length of time that the device must prevent deletion (including an infinite amount of time).
- Finally, archival applications often have strong authenticity requirements. Customers may need to know that the originally ingested document has not been tampered with or altered in any way. Once again, XAM has built-in support for content time-stamping on ingest as well as restriction of alteration when it comes to content (this is known as “binding” in XAM-speak).
Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
