Long-Term Digital Information Retention & Preservation Working Group Formed by SNIA

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)