It’s dangerous to go alone! How about *we* do this!?

We’re all worried about preserving digital assets at some level. One of the most concerning parts of this process is the storage component, and as new and larger objects and collections come under libraries’ care, the pressure to find long-term storage solutions is growing. There are a lot of solutions vying for mind-share — many of them commercial — but it’s unclear the extent to which these solutions really represent sustainable alternatives. But what if there were a way for us to do this? Not “us” you or me, but “us”: you and me. What if “us” is all of us in the country? What does that mean for sustainability, and the future of trustworthy repositories? If we could do this, what might it look like? Are there models in place elsewhere that might help inform what this Canadian solution might look like?

This session will discuss issues around sustainability with a variety of commercial storage options and compare those with the significant potentials created by a series of recent, open-source driven, developments in the hardware and software worlds. We’ll talk about what software and APIs are available to make a locally created storage network accessible to your applications, and will demonstrate how you can build a scalable community cloud storage solution using commodity hardware that allows for middleware replication, geographic diversification, object storage using a common API, and remote management.