Materials from the Workshop Storage Architectures for Digital Preservation organized by the Library of Congress NDIIPP program, held on September 22-23, 2009 are available at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/events/other_meetings/storage09/index.html
Note in particular the set of presentations on Data Integrity. Each segment of the workshop included extensive discussion, and one point mentioned only in passing in the LC notes worth highlighting for the CNI community was a developing initiative within the US Federal Government and the High Performance Computing community addressing Resilient Computing — the design of systems that continue to function in useful ways even in the face of extensive component failures. Thusfar, much of the thinking in this area has focused on computational systems rather than storage systems (see, for example, the frightening report “Towards Exascale Resilience” at
http://jointlab.ncsa.illinois.edu/pubs/Toward_Exascale_Resilience.pdf and additional materials hosted at http://institutes.lanl.gov/resilience/).
These ideas are likely to be very important in future thinking about how to design digital preservation systems that minimize and constrain loss, rather than pursuing perfectly lossless systems, which are likely to be both technologically and economically unachievable at very large scale, as some of the presentations at the LC Symposium suggest. CNI Director Clifford Lynch expanded a little bit on these ideas in the October 6, 2009 CNI Conversations (the audio file of this session is available at
https://www.cni.org/cni_conversations/).