Preserving Digital Data in Heterogeneous Environments

Abstract

Digital preservation aims at maintaining digital objects accessible over a long period of time, regardless of the challenges of organizational or technological changes or failures. In particular, data produced in e-Science domains could be reliably stored in today’s data grids, taking advantage of the natural properties of this kind of infrastructure to support redundancy. However, to achieve reliability we must take into account failure interdependency. Taking into account the fact that correlated failures can affect multiple components and potentially cause complete loss of data, we propose a solution to evaluate redundancy strategies in the context of heterogeneous environments such as data grids. This solution is based on a simulation engine that can be used not only to support the process of designing the preservation environment and related policies, but also later on to observe and control the deployed system.