Scalable Services for Digital Preservation

Due to rapid changes in information technology, digital data, documents, and records are doomed to become uninterpretable bit-streams within short time periods. Digital Preservation deals with the longterm storage, access, and maintenance of digital data objects. In order to prevent a loss of information, digital libraries and archives are increasingly faced with the need to electronically preserve vast amounts of data while having limited computational resources in-house. However, due to the potentially immense data sets and computationally intensive tasks involved, preservation systems have become a recognized challenge for e-science and e-infrastructures. In this paper, we argue that grid and cloud technology can provide the crucial technology for building scalable preservation systems. We introduce a strategy for utilizing cloud infrastructures that are based on platform virtualization as a scaling environment for the execution of preservation workflows. We present recent developments on a Job Submission Service that is based on standard grid mechanisms and capable of providing large clusters of virtual machines. Finally, we present experimental results that have been conducted on the Amazon EC2 and S3 utility cloud infrastructure.