NEWS RELEASE: Fedora Commons/Sun StorageTek (TM) 5800 System

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, payette@cs.cornell.edu
Carol Minton Morris,
(607) 255-2702, clt6@cornell.edu
<http://www.fedora-commons.org>http://www.fedora-commons.org

Fedora Commons Integrates Its Software Platform with the Sun 
StorageTek(TM) 5800 System
Ithaca, New York, November 13, 2007 - Fedora Commons , a non-profit 
organization which provides sustainable technologies to create, 
manage, publish, share and preserve digital information assets, 
announced today plans to integrate the Fedora Commons software 
platform with the Sun StorageTek(TM) 5800 System. This collaboration 
provides a substantial opportunity to advance open systems for 
durable access to the digital information assets, which increasingly 
forms the basis for our intellectual, organizational, scientific and 
cultural heritage. 

The Fedora Commons free, open-source software platform uses a 
service-oriented architecture that enables the creation of 
collaborative, integrated information spaces where any information 
entity can be linked to any other entity. The StorageTek 5800 system 
has advanced data integrity, resilience and failure tolerance over 
other storage system designs, and includes customer-defined arbitrary 
metadata indexing and search. Customers can seamlessly scale, saving 
millions of dollars in administrative costs over traditional storage, 
and be assured of an advanced level of data availability.

During the creation or authoring of intellectual works, changes occur 
rapidly, but over their lifecycle these works become fixed 
information assets.  New scholarship is built upon earlier works and 
new science is built upon other research. Without durable access to 
previous works, research progress cannot be sustained.  Unless key 
digital assets such as datasets and analyses are reliably kept and 
their authenticity is guaranteed, the scientific method may be 
compromised and the results may be questioned.  The StorageTek 5800 
provides a powerful capability to handle fixed unstructured 
information assets.

The Fedora Commons software platform and StorageTek 5800 architecture 
form a natural synergy for the creation, management, use and care of 
fixed information.  Both systems recognize that, over time, all 
technologies and formats change.  Dan Davis, Fedora Commons Chief 
Software Architect, notes, "We must develop an open-ended, 
evolutionary, interoperable architecture, built upon open standards, 
to ensure that our digital heritage remains accessible and useful, 
now and in the future." 

It is hard to imagine all the ways in which our digital information 
assets will be used and how knowledge will be synthesized in the 
future. Users and software applications must be free to use, fuse 
(mash-up), and repurpose information in new and innovative ways.  Dan 
Davis observed, "The StorageTek 5800 extensive and flexible support 
for metadata closely integrated with the content is a natural enabler 
for the Fedora Commons semantic linking and dissemination 
capabilities. Using our offerings together will provide a 
straightforward, easy way to support the entire information lifecycle 
from creation to preservation, and to facilitate rapidly building 
innovative applications or mash-ups while ensuring your information 
is secure." 

To learn more about Fedora and Sun solutions for digital content, 
visit <http://www.fedora-commons.org>http://www.fedora-commons.org 
and <http://sun.com/storagetek/>http://sun.com/storagetek/.  For more 
information contact Carol Minton Morris at (607)255-2702.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo and StorageTek are trademarks or 
registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States 
and other countries.

-- 
Carol Minton Morris
Communications Director
National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
http://NSDL.org

Communications and Media Director
Fedora Commons
http://www.fedora-commons.org

Cornell Information Science
301 College Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 255-2702
clt6@cornell.edu