The University of Arizona has more than 20 archives filled with 150,000 fine prints and 5 to 6 million papers, prints and physical items.
It even has one of Ansel Adams’ cameras, and one of his hats.
What the university didn’t have was a place to archive its digital artifacts.
As a result, The University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography partnered with Zetta.net to store its digital, mission-critical content.
How Zetta.net Works
Eddie Tsiao VP of Engineering at Zetta.net says Zetta helps colleges archive digital content through three main components:
1) Controlling back end storage, which is managed by Zetta’s backend technology.
2) The front end component, which features clients that are downloaded on the machines a college wants to backup.
3) Direct support from actual Zetta team members when something goes wrong with the technology.
“We have a portal that allows users to manage their backups and manage their systems remotely and all the way through the front end client, which coordinates the backup for a specific system and sends that data back to us,” Tsiao says. “The advantage of having a complete system is that we can rightly go hand and hand with a lot of the things that improve performance.”
Tsiao also says Zetta provides safer features than a Cloud-based archival solution does, and keeps sensitive data under lock and key through encryption.
“One of the main concerns that a lot of corporations and government agencies have is security of data on public Cloud, and I think there are a lot of people writing about it now; “how do you know it’s secure?”” he says. “You don’t know how many people are sharing access or the encryption keys in the back end, and all of that is kind of hidden from the customer. With us, we control all of that… Customers have multiple encryption keys of volumes within their domains. It’s a very granular control that we have.”
Before partnering with Zetta, Jim Coleman says the University of Arizona relied on technical support provided by the campus library for its storage needs.
A couple of years ago, when one of the library deans retired, that archival support diminished. From there, the Center for Creative Photography turned to Central IT to support its archival system.
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