A multiplatform archiving solution

Arcsys and the ArVitam line

For more than 10 years, Infotel has carried out important projects in the archiving domain: World Patent Office, The French Post, The Popular Banks, The Crédit Lyonnais, AGF…
Arcsys and the ArVitam products line were conceived on the basis of this experience to answer the multiple needs of the archiving market:

• Economical and Technical
• Documentary
• Patrimony
• Fiscal
• Legal.

Multiformat and multiplatform archiving

Arcsys provides a unique interface to handle all types of company archives:

• mainframe, documents, users files as well as mails, ERP or databases, any numeric data can be archived;
• data of heterogeneous formats can be grouped and archived as functionally coherent sets;
• archiving is performed interactively or through automated process: customizable connectors on each platform independently retrieve enterprise data and archive it according to the specified archiving policy;
• a complete set of archiving and retrieval APIs allows to create specific connectors according to the enterprise specific requirements.

Navigating through the archives

Searching for a specific archive is not easy if the only access criteria are the file name or its approximate date:

• assigning keywords allows multicriteria research and consulting;
• the keywords and relevant rules can be customized according to business requirements through indexing policies for each type of archive;
• a Web interface for research, archiving and restitution is provided as well as a complete set of APIs to create customized interfaces;
• for recent or important archives, the utility provides direct consulting (example: access to a Word document in less than one second).

Archiving reliability

The system ensures archive reliability even if the archive moves several times to other storage devices:

• the automatic calculation and the storage of the archive’s signature allow you to check its integrity every time while reading the archive or moving it to another storage device. Several cryptographic algorithms are available (MD5, SHA-1 (160 bits) up to SHA-512);
• the automatic recording of whole archiving operations ensures a complete traceability. The time stamping is secured by an external time referential;
• the archives are stored with their signatures, their descriptions and keywords in a non proprietary format: thus the archives are self-descriptive and independent from the archiving solution;
• the access rights can be customized through your company’s authentication and authorization means (LDAP…);
• the automatic and regular check of the archives allow identification and replacement of faulty storage devices, such as damaged magnetic tapes.

Flexible and evolving management of storage means

Arcsys provides several solutions to manage storage devices:

• the "online" management of devices with a "file system" interface allows Arcsys real-time access to recent or important archives;
• Arcsys can make use of several Media Managers and thus is able to access any existing storage device, from "nearline" devices to "offline" devices;
• as your business needs require, a specific storage policy for each archive type allows to define the storage devices, the number of copies and the retention times;
• each time a storage policy is modified, Arcsys automatically handles the necessary processing : this provides increased flexibility to manage physical storage devices.

An open and evolutive architecture

Arcsys ensures long-term data preservation, whatever the enterprise’s evolution and data processing environment may deem necessary:

• information system evolution: the Arcsys components are implemented according to the market standards: OS (z/OS, Unix, Linux, Windows…), RDBMS (Oracle, DB2, MySQL..), Media Manager (Net Backup, TSM…);
• storage means evolution: Arcsys entirely handles the migrations between storage devices including integrity checks;
• applications and tools evolution: Arcsys records the formats of archives, and thus allow to perform audits and conversion processing;
• activity volume growth: the modular structure and the redundancy availabilities of the different components provide an adaptative solution.

Administration

The administration functions are available through a graphical Web interface to answer business requirements:

• to set up bases for segmentation of the archiving platform in as many required logical entities;
• to set up collections, that include specific indexing and storage policies for each archive source;
• to monitor the archiving process in real-time, including anomalies and stored volumes.