LTACSI Projects

LTACSI is a cooperative effort of end users, IT professionals, vendors, integrators, and service providers with interests in the challenges of long-term archiving and storage compliance with governmental and business regulations.

If you would like to volunteer to assist with any of the projects described below, or have other projects that you would like to lead, please join the DMF.

Active Projects

Compliance Rules List white paper

The Compliance Rules List will be a directory of key US and international regulations governing requirements on data storage and management. The document will briefly describe the industry and geographical scope, regulatory authority and key dates related to each regulation. It will point out the high-level business requirements that derive from each regulation, and where applicable, will point out potential conflicts between regulations. In its initial version, the document will not offer advice on legal interpretation of the regulations, or technical recommendations on how to comply with them.

Archiving and Compliance Metrics white paper

Many solutions exist for solving long-term archiving and compliance storage challenges, but there are few ways for end users to objectively compare how different solutions stack up on the problems that they face. The Archiving and Compliance Metrics white paper will introduce some basic concepts that all solutions share, and help customers know the right questions to ask so that they can meaningfully compare differing solutions.

Fixed Content Aware Storage (FCAS) TWG charter 

The SNIA Fixed Content Aware Storage Technical Working Group is being chartered to serve as a center of technical activities related to application-level object storage, specifically including Content Addressed Storage (CAS) and other naming schemas. This charter includes development of standards to allow applications to be storage vendor agnostic, interoperability standards to allow shared metadata integral with application data, interoperability standards to allow application data sharing, and SMI-s CIM profiles to manage object storage resources.

The 100 Year Archive Task Force

The challenges of retaining online archives for extended periods of time in the face of variable media life, equipment obsolescence, and changing operating environments is daunting.  This concept of a "100 Year Archive" is the guiding principal for LTACSI's long-term archive projects.  Two major challenges include maintaining physical readability, the ability to get back the bits written, and maintaining logical readability, the ability to understand and manipulate those bits. The 100 Year Archive task force is a multi-organizational team preparing educational materials for end users on how to tackle these problems.  Go to the 100 Year Archive Task Force

Among other projects, the task force will create a white paper to describe best practices and recommendations for extended archive and compliance lifetimes, including:

• Decision factors and best practices for long-term retention
• Technology choices, media life and technology refresh considerations
• Discovery, search, legal and regulatory considerations

Self-Describing Data Format (SDDF) task force

The SDDF task force is investigating new mechanisms for maintaining long-term logical readability in The 100 Year Archive.  The task force proposes a mechanism so that vendors can continue to use their proprietary formats, but provide portable "accessor methods" to the data in those files. This metadata regarding the data format will provide data accessibility even when the original writing application is no longer available.

The SDDF task force has a weekly call at 1:00pm, ET.  If you are interested in assisting with this project, please join the LTACSI group to gain access to the dial-in information.