Image by Marco Ansaloni via http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
As the world waits on the election/selection of a new Pope, beneath the Vatican is analog to digital conversion treasure trove. We’re talking about more than 50 miles of shelving, loaded with parchments and yellowing papers dating as far back as the eighth century.
And, that treasure trove will consume about 2.8 Petabytes of hard disk drive (HDD) storage. Since the highest capacity drive today is 4 Terabytes, the minimum number of drives used could exceed 700 (when factoring in redundancy, failover, performance, etc.), and the lucky winner of this project: EMC.
According to EMC’s press release, “EMC will support the Vatican Apostolic Library in digitizing its catalogue of 80,000 historic manuscripts and 8,900 incunabula as part of EMC’s Information Heritage Initiative. The project will completely digitize the library, resulting in 40 million pages preserved in digital reproductions. The first phase of the nine-year project will provision 2.8 petabytes of storage, utilizing a range of industry-leading solutions from EMC including Atmos®, Data Domain®, EMC Isilon®, NetWorker® and VNX®.
Obviously, given its size, the Vatican archives are one of, if not the “holy grail” (pun intended) of digital preservation projects.
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