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MEMORIES OF HOLOCAUST VICTIMS ENSHRINED

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 6, Issue 3 - April 2006

Next-generation storage systems are helping to ensure that the memories of more than six million victims of the Holocaust - and its survivors - will always live on

When Yad Vashem first opened its doors in 1953 as Israel's official Holocaust memorial, it began a poignant and stirring journey to become what is now considered to be the world's preeminent library, museum and archive to preserve the memory of more than six million Holocaust victims.

Today, Yad Vashem - also known as the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority - spans 45 acres on Jerusalem's Mount of Remembrance and includes unique museums, memorial sites and research facilities.

Despite its rich current impact, the sprawling complex still faced a challenge similar to many organisations charged
with preserving history: how to continue to make its documents and recorded audio and video testimonies relevant to future generations.

A few years back, not content to sit passively and just wait for attendees to visit its campus, Yad Vashem's management team, headed by chairman Avner Shalev, began to wrestle with how best to extend the rich history of the holocaust beyond the confines of its physical walls and geographical campus boundaries into a more proactive, virtual world that knows few boundaries.

The reaching of its 50-year anniversary in 2005 brought home a key truth for the organisation: that there would come a time in the not too distant future when living survivors of the Holocaust would no longer be available to provide the critical relevance and link to its history for the current generation.

During the next 50 years and beyond, individuals like Shalev thus reasoned, Yad Vashem would need to be transformed to appeal to the varied needs of new generations. "The generation of the future is immersed in a world of stimulating, high-impact media. We must relate to the visitors of the 21st century in their language," he accepts.

Keeping to the original spirit of the Hebrew phrase, Vehigadeta Lebincha ("And you will tell your children"), Shalev and his team set out on an ambitious, multi-year development plan that included digitising much of its existing archives and library. The end goal is ultimately to offer as much of its documentation, names database and testimonies via the Internet, on-demand, from anywhere in the world.

Fulfilling such a vision has been both exciting and daunting, says Michael Lieber, CIO of Yad Vashem, who is quick to note that the task would have been practically impossible to achieve without the availability of today’s more affordable options for disk storage.

"We have close to 100 million pages of documentation, 300,000 photos connected to the Holocaust, and something like 50,000 hours of audio and video testimony. The average cassette and video are each about three hours long," he says.

"Once you digitise that information, you have to be able to store those digital materials somewhere. To bring Yad Vashem's new vision to life, we needed enormous amounts of online storage for these read-only materials."

Being conscious of the non-profit organisation's limited budget, Lieber knew he would have to look outside of Yad Vashem's more costly production systems in order to solve the problem of where to house such a large digital archive.

The current production system - responsible for on-going efforts to digitise and catalogue new materials coming online - incorporated Oracle and a document management system, along with about 30TB of disk storage.

While that level of storage worked well for the on-going needs of system developers and those inputting catalogue information, Lieber knew that level of system would be overkill for the on-going needs of the digital archive, especially once the digitised data had reached a more static, read-only state.

Strategy rethink
"We already knew we couldn't afford to have all our systems on expensive high-end disk storage. We had to decide where we most needed the high-end systems and where we could incorporate more economical storage," explains Lieber.

During his quest for more storage, he was advised to check out Nexsan Technologies by the CIO of the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Lieber soon followed up on the tip and contacted the company to enquire about obtaining a demo storage array which he could test in his own environment. During the test phase, he connected 80 local terminals in Yad Vashem's Visual Center to a Nexsan ATABeast system and soon began serving video testimonies across it. After running the test for a mere three days, he was sold on the technology and ordered the first of two SATABeast enterprise-class storage systems from Nexsan.

"Most CIOs are risk takers, because they have to decide on which technology they should bet,” says Lieber.

“In my case, the risk is even worse, since I must be very careful with how the organis- ation spends its funds. On the other hand, it forces me to take risks where other CIOs might decide to wait. That risk paid off when we went to Nexsan."

"While the pricing of Nexsan is about one third of what you'd pay for an EMC Clariion or comparable system, the SATABeast delivers very good performance for us and allows us to put two systems together and copy the information between them. In effect, Nexsan has brought the cost down to virtually a commodity level. This leaves us asking, 'why pay high prices for an archive when we don't have to?'"

Yad Vashem currently has two SATABeast arrays in use on the organisation's storage area network, with more planned in future as it invests in infrastructure to support a more extensive Internet delivery model.

One SATABeast currently serves the on-demand video and audio needs of 50 workstations at the organisation's visual centre, while another acts as an intermediate online backup repository for copies of disk-based snapshots and data taken from the primary production systems. Lieber's team also uses the second SATABeast as a virtual tape library, in conjunction with existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup procedures.

Besides its primary use as an economical digital archive for large quantities of testimonies and documents, Lieber estimates the SATABeast has easily saved his team as much as a few hours a day on backup and recovery tasks. "Access time for retrieval of backup data, like retrieving a mailbox, has been nearly instant from the Nexsan system," he states.

He looks forward to the day his team has Yad Vashem's "enormous" video-on-demand system running full steam, and ready to furnish audio, video or documents on demand across the Internet and other multimedia venues around the world. His current plans include putting a Nexsan system on the Internet during the next upgrade phase of the project.

In the meantime, he plans to use Nexsan to help add another 8,500 testimonies to Yad Vashem's digital archives. The testimonies, already recorded by USC's Shoah Foundation Institute, comprise about 40TB of data. Up until Nexsan, Lieber could see no easy way to obtain and integrate digital copies of the testimonies for Yad Vashem.

Now he hopes to use the SATABeast system as a "digital suitcase", sending it to the Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles and having them copy all of the testimonies it contains before shipping it back.

"Nexsan has made digital archiving viable," concludes Lieber. "Two to three years ago, it would have taken somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 to do the whole thing. Now, with Nexsan, it's a whole different ball game." ST