The medium-term prospects for long-term storage systems
Abstract
Purpose
Increasingly, the content that libraries collect is no longer on paper, a long-lived, medium whose technology changes very slowly and with which they have centuries of experience. Instead, it is stored on relatively short-lived digital media whose technology appears to change rapidly and with which they have little history. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
The storage media industry is highly competitive and is currently evolving rapidly as flash, a solid state medium, displaces spinning disk from many applications. Long-term archival storage is a small part of the total storage market. It typically re-uses media and systems intended for more general bulk storage.
Findings
What are the medium-term prospects for change in this market?
Originality/value
Much of this material has appeared in blog posts and talks aimed at storage experts, such as the recent DARPA workshop on future of storage. It is presented here for a librarian audience with the necessary additional exposition and background.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Seagate, and in particular to Dave B. Anderson, for (twice) allowing the author to pontificate about their industry, to Brian Berg for his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of flash, and Tom Coughlin for illuminating discussions and the graph of exabytes shipped. This is not to say that they agree with any of the above. This work was supported by the institutional members of the LOCKSS Alliance and the CLOCKSS Archive.
Citation
Rosenthal, D.S.H. (2017), "The medium-term prospects for long-term storage systems", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 35 No. 1, pp. 11-31. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-11-2016-0128
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited