EMASS, automated data storage providers, represented in South Africa by Supported Software is making a valuable contribution to the preservation of testimonies and historical documents relating to the survivors of the Holocaust.
The product provides an automated storage solution of the "Survivors of the Shoah", a Visual History Foundation founded by film director Steven Spielberg.
The aim of the project is to create the world's most comprehensive electronic library containing data relationship relating to some tens of thousands of living survivors of the Holocaust.
While referred to by Spielberg himself, as a 'rescue mission with a time clock' most of these survivors range between the ages of 63 and 100 years old the project posed huge storage challenges to us administrators. It is estimated that the Survivors of the Shoah will generate more than 100 terabytes of data when completed.
"We needed an automated archive that can store virtually any kind of media to accommodate the capacity of each data intensive application," said a spokesmen for the "Survivors of the Shoah" Foundation.
"EMASS was selected because it provides a flexible solution that can be incrementally expanded as additional capacity would be needed," said Leon Theron, Managing Director of Supported Software. Shoah officials wanted a solution that would allow easy integration of new data storage technologies (data drives, storage media, transfer channel protocols) as they would become available in the future.
The officials also wanted a storage solution that would integrate with their existing Silicon Graphics server and workstations, as well as with their custom-designed Sybase and Cinebase content management databases. Finally they wanted a storage solution that would deliver performance with system reliability to handle the complex storage and accessing requirements of Shoah's five remote storage repositories in the United States and Israel. These requirements are addressed by AML/E Automated Media Library from EMASS.
As the Shoah project moves forward, the ongoing technical challenge for the EMASS AML/E will be to continue to meet workload requirements. To handle the tremendous capacity and I/O load requirements, EMASS has integrated four IBM 3590 tape drives into the library. They are then connected to an SGI Challenge server through fast and wide SCSI-2 channels. With such massive throughput requirements from Shoah's growing number of applications, the issues of capacity, performance, and system flexibility could reach a critical juncture as Spielberg's project races against time. "The AML/E addresses these issues, with the capacity to grow as Shoah records grow," the Shoah spokesman said.
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Editors note
EMASS Inc., headquartered in Denver, Colorado, develops high-performance, scaleable capacity automated mixed media library solutions. These solutions integrate both hardware and software to meet mainframe and client-server requirements for data storage management, storage connectivity, HSM and media management applications. EMASS solutions meet the complex data storage requirements of such diverse industries as telecommunications, energy exploration, banking, insurance, manufacturing, scientific, broadcasting and healthcare.
Supported Software, is a leading provider of software solutions representing many major international software companies in South Africa. The company specialises in a variety of systems such as electronic document management, storage management and systems management. These are installed among the Top 200 companies in South Africa.
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