Monday 5 February 2007

P2P + Lockss: a cheap archiiving solution?


Just read an interesting article in wired on Joost, the internet TV startup. And I've had an idea:

One of the problems about digital archiving is that you need to have multiple copies in multiple locations to ensure the safety of documents you are archiving. This is the idea behind Lockss and using HSM systems to write two copies to differeing locations. Basically you are betting that if the building burns down (an unlikely event) the other building won't burn down ( an even more unlikely event ).

The trouble is the infrastructure to do this is expensive. Tickling away at the back of my mind is the idea of using some form of p2p network to distribute the archive to multiple locations using cheap off the shelf hardware - bascially marrying p2p with lockss. That way information is well distrubuted and secure, say by putting an archive box with an adsl connection in every public library in the country.

The nice thing is it can use standard p2p client stuff to retrieve the software and avoids the overhead of Storage Resource Broker or indeed any of the other vritual distributed storage architectures ...

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