Building on the results of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Data Management Forum's (DMF) 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey the Association has taken several steps to help storage and information managing professionals improve their long-term information retention and preservation practices. At the forefront of these efforts is the formation of a Long-Term Digital Information Retention and Preservation Technical Working Group (LT-DIRP TWG) aimed at defining a new logical format standard and best practices for information preservation and migration.

"The results of the requirements study clearly found that there is a critical need for well-defined practices and standards associated with the long-term retention and preservation of an organization's important information," said Gary Zasman, Chair, DMF Long-Term Archive and Compliance Storage Initiative. "With more than 70 percent of respondents saying they are 'highly dissatisfied' with their ability to assure that they will be able to read and interpret their retained information in 50 years, there is a critical need for standards to assist users in retaining and preserving information for the future of their organizations. The requirements to keep information long term exist in many governmental regulations and organizational practices, but the existing technologies to support those requirements are costly and complex."

As a result of these key findings, the SNIA DMF has spearheaded the creation of the LT-DIRP TWG and defined its principle objectives. The LT-DIRP TWG will be focused on the two top technical challenges of long-term digital information retention and preservation, enabling physical and logical preservation and migration. To achieve these objectives the LT-DIRP TWG will work to develop a new application-centric standard called a Self-Describing Self-Contained Data Format (SD-SCDF). This standard will define a 'preservation-oriented' logical container consisting of the content (the data) and associated preservation metadata, including reference information, integrity and authenticity controls, audit records and potentially event readers.

The SD-SCDF standard will be designed for implementation directly by application developers or in conjunction with the SNIA standard application to storage interface, the eXtensible Access Method (XAM). XAM's ability to store information independent of the application that created it, and SD-SCDF's ability to define the information being stored, enhances the ability for information to be properly and securely preserved and interpreted long into the future.


SNIA Data Management Forum

Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)