A Cost-Effective Large LOCKSS Box

Back in August I wrote A Cost-Effective DIY LOCKSS Box, describing a small, 8-slot LOCKSS box capable of providing about 48TB of raw RAID-6 storage at about $64/TB. Now, the existing boxes in the CLOCKSS Archive's 12-node network are nearing the end of their useful life. We are starting a rolling program to upgrade them with much larger boxes to accommodate future growth in the archive.

Last week the first of the upgraded LOCKSS boxes came on-line. They are 4U systems with 45 slots for 3.5" drives from 45drives.com, the same boxes Backblaze uses. We are leaving 9 slots empty for future upgrades and populating the rest with 36 8TB WD Gold drives, giving about 224TB of raw RAID-6 storage, say a bit over 200TB after file system overhead. etc. We are specifying 64GB of RAM and dual CPUs. This configuration on the 45drives website is about $28K before tax and shipping. Using the cheaper WD Purple drives it would be about $19K.

45drives has recently introduced a cost-reduced version. Configuring this with 45 8TB Purple drives and 32GB RAM would get 280TB for $17K, or about $61/TB. It would be even cheaper with the Seagate 8TB archive drives we are using in the 8-slot box.

Talk on Private LOCKSS Networks at PASIG

I stood in for Vicky Reich to give an overview of Private LOCKSS Networks to the PASIG meeting. Below the fold, an edited text of the talk with links to the sources.

1000 long-tail publishers!

The e-journal content that is at risk of loss or cancellation comes from the "long tail" of small publishers. Somehow, the definition of "small publisher" has come to be one that publishes ten or fewer journals. This seems pretty big to me, but if we adopt this definition the LOCKSS Program just passed an important milestone. We just sent out a press release announcing that the various networks using LOCKSS technology now preserve content from over 1000 long-tail publishers. There is still a long way to go, but as the press release says:

there are tens of thousands of long tail publishers worldwide, which makes preserving the first 1,000 publishers an important first step to a larger endeavor to protect vulnerable digital content.

TRAC Audit: Lessons

This is the third in a series of posts about CRL's TRAC audit of the CLOCKSS Archive. Previous posts announced the release of the certification report, and recounted the audit process. Below the fold I look at the lessons we and others can learn from our experiences during the audit.

TRAC Audit: Process

This is the second in a series of posts about CRL's audit of the CLOCKSS Archive. In the first, I announced the release of the certification report. In this one I recount the process of being audited and what we did during it. Follow me below the fold for a long story, but not as long as the audit process.

Update: the third post discussing the lessons to be drawn is here.

TRAC Certification of the CLOCKSS Archive

The CLOCKSS Archive is a dark archive of e-journal and e-book content, jointly managed by publishers and libraries, implemented using the LOCKSS technology and operated on behalf of the CLOCKSS not-for-profit by the LOCKSS team at the Stanford Library. For well over a year the LOCKSS team and CLOCKSS management have been preparing for and undergoing the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) process for the CLOCKSS Archive with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL).

CRL just released the Certification Report on the CLOCKSS Archive. I'm happy to report that our work was rewarded with an overall score that equals the previous best, and the first ever perfect score in the "Technologies, Technical Infrastructure, Security" category. We are grateful for this wonderful endorsement of the LOCKSS technology.

In the interests of transparency the LOCKSS team have released all the non-confidential documentation submitted during the audit process. As you will see, there is a lot of it. What you see at the link is not exactly what we submitted. It has been edited to correct errors and obscurities we found during the audit, and to add material from the confidential part of the submission that we decided was not really confidential. These documents will continue to be edited as the underlying reality changes, to keep them up-to-date and satisfy one of the on-going requirements of the certification.

This is just a news item. In the near future I will follow up with posts describing the process of being audited, what we did to make the process work, and the lessons we learned that may be useful for future audits.

Update: the post describing the audit process is here and the post discussing the lessons to be drawn is here.

PREMIS & LOCKSS

We were asked if the CLOCKSS Archive uses PREMIS metadata. The answer is no, and a detailed explanation is below the fold.