Digital Storage in the Cloud:
Amazon Web Services & DSpace
Barry Davis - Coordinator of Multimedia & Digital Production Services
Kevin Gilbertson - Web Services Librarian
Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
http://aws.amazon.com/
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Amazon's flexible web service platform
Pay as you go services
Choose which services are suited to your needs
Reliable
AWS Pricing
AWS @ ZSR
Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (Amazon EC2):
• Host Library Website, Blogs, Wikis, Online Catalog (VuFind),
Online Repository (DSpace) and other services on EC2
• Quickly create and configure new servers in case of failure
• Easy to add additional disk space to server
• Library has complete control
Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS):
• Creates volumes to attach to our EC2 servers.
• Volumes can be a variety of sizes and can be moved from
instance to instance.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3):
• Used for server backups
• Tested for use with Library Faculty/Staff file sharing and
storage
WakeSpace - A Digital Archive
http://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/jspui/
• Built on open source DSpace platform
• Currently houses 132GB of data on a 200GB partition
• Includes PDF documents, image files, audio files, and video
files.
WakeSpace uses
• Used as a storage location for other sites
o http://www.digitalforsyth.org/
o http://cloud.lib.wfu.edu/blog/ammons/videos/
• ETD Repository
• Institutional Repository
• Online storage and discovery of digitized materials such as
Special Collections and Archives materials or special events
Advantages of DSpace on Amazon
• Ability to scale storage easily:
Create new EC2 volumes and add them to
DSpace's configuration or resize current volume to large size
when needed. This reduces overhead as you pay for what you
need as you need it.
• No hardware concerns:
No physical drives to manage, Amazon platform to rely on.
• Control:
The library has complete access and control over our system.
Disadvantages of DSpace on Amazon
• Loss of control:
Your material is not local, therefore there is a very small risk of
data loss.
• Not right for everyone:
In our case, we took on all server duties, which requires much
more work than allowing an IT body to handle everything.
Contact Us!
Email:
gilberkm@wfu.edu
davijb@wfu.edu