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Scientists at Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz have developed a solution to store vast amounts of digital information in a way that allows future generations to recover it.

Pergamum team from left to right; Kevin Greenan (graduate student), Mark Storer (graduate student) and associate professor of computer science Ethan Miller. (Credit: UCSC)

Pergamum, named after the ancient Greek library that made the transition from fragile papyrus to more durable parchment, is a distributed network of intelligent, disk-based storage devices.

The team that developed it includes UCSC graduate students Mark Storer and Kevin Greenan, along with researcher Kaladhar Voruganti of NetApp (formerly Network Appliance), a company that focuses on storage and data management solutions.

Pergamum provides solution to one of the most important digital age problem; how to store vast amount of digital data.

According to Professor Miller:

The problem is how to build a large-scale data storage system to last 50 to 100 years.

Traditionally digital tape drives have been used to store data. They work well for backups, in which data are written once, rarely read, and not kept indefinitely. But archival data should be easy to read, query, browse, and search, and tape has inherent weaknesses in these areas.

Miller’s group has come up with a new approach, called Pergamum, which uses hard disk drives to provide energy-efficient, cost-effective storage. The declining cost of hard drives has made them more competitive with tape, and they offer numerous advantages for searching and retreiving data.

It’s like the difference between a VCR and TiVo.

Miller said.

Pergamum uses individual building blocks consisting of a hard drive; a small, low-power processor (like the chip in an iPhone); a flash memory card; and an ethernet port. These units, called “tomes,” are connected using relatively inexpensive Ethernet switches.

Each tome is like a minicomputer, but with very low power demands. When not in use, it can shut down almost completely.

Miller said.

Even when active, the devices use very little power (less than 13 watts), which can be delivered over the network using Power over Ethernet technology. As a result, each unit is essentially a self-contained box with a network connection. The flash memory provides low-power, persistent storage so that many operations can be performed without activating the hard drive.

For reliability, Pergamum uses two levels of redundancy–within and between disks–to protect from both disk failures and errors in writing data to a disk (so-called “latent sector errors”). Tomes can be easily added to expand the system or to replace failed disks.

Data storage archive is a big issue for businesses, partly due to legal requirements for the preservation of financial and business records. Long-term storage is also a growing issue for individuals who are filling their personal computers with digital photos, movies, and documents.

According to Storer:

There is a risk that an entire generation’s cultural history could be lost if people aren’t able to retrieve that data,” Storer said. Everyone is switching to digital cameras, but we’ve never demonstrated that digital data can be reliably preserved for a long time.

He further said:

In 50 years, the devices might use holographic storage. As long as you can wrap the new storage medium in this intelligent layer that speaks the protocol, it can participate in the network.