As part of Sun Microsystem’s Preservation Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG), the EPrints team have been collaborating with Sun to enable EPrints to be used with archival storage products, such as the Honeycomb (STK-5800).
This collaboration has informed the development of the new EPrints 3.2 Storage Controller that enables the repository to distribute its objects between many storage platforms according to the rules laid down in an XML policy language. Hybrid storage provides the maximum flexibility for storage decisions based on object properties and related metadata, allowing multiple copies to be managed across local, archival and cloud storage services.
We are pleased to announce that we have been working collaboratively with Sun’s Cloud Computing Unit to allow the EPrints Storage Controller to link to the forthcoming Sun Cloud Storage Service (due for release later this year). A demonstration is available at this week’s Community One conference in San Francisco. EPrints is one of a few software products to have gained an entry in the early adopters catalog (available at the conference).
With an Amazon S3 plugin already available for the EPrints Storage controller, Sun’s Cloud Storage Service was the logical next step in terms of cloud providers and EPrints hopes in the future to release a connector for the Microsoft Azure platform as well as the DuraSpace proposed DuraCloud service.
Watch this space for more EPrints 3.2 news!