Archival and Preservation: Open Source and Open Archive
One of the more exciting and interesting projects I've been involved with this year centers around Sun's Open Archive systems for Digital Repositories - the use of Open Source software and Sun off-the-shelf hardware to implement world-class data preservation/archival systems. For those of you who remember Sun's Honeycomb archival hardware, this new architecture represents a truly open alternative approach - based on Fedora Commons' offering, OpenSolaris, Sun's X64 servers, JBOD disk arrays and (soon) Unified Storage Systems.
One of the first efforts Sun ISV Engineering contributed to involved sizing and performance testing of Fedora atop OpenSolaris, ZFS and JBODs. The results are both encouraging and impressive, and provide myriad follow-on testing opportunities. I've attached the first draft of test report here.
