"The Internet Archive offers long-term digital preservation to the ephemeral Internet", stated Brewster Kahle, founder, the Internet Archive organisation. "As more of the world's most valuable information moves on-line and data grows exponentially, the Internet Archive will serve as a living history to ensure future generations can access and continue to preserve these important documents over time."

Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation that has built a library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form that include moving images, live audio, audio and text formats. The Archive offers free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public; and also features "The Wayback Machine" - a digital time capsule that allows users to see archived versions of Web pages across time. At the end of 2008, the Internet Archive housed over three petabtyes of information, which is roughly equivalent to about 150 times the information contained in the Library of Congress. Going forward, the Archive is expected to grow at approximately 100 terabytes a month.

"We've worked closely with the Internet Archive to ensure the right technology platform is in place to handle and manage growing amounts of the world's most valuable data and that it lives on for future generations", stated Dave Douglas, Chief Sustainability Officer and senior vice-president of Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems Inc. "The combination of open storage technology innovation in a Sun Modular Datacenter is a perfect match for this organisation's mission and gives them the storage performance they need in a smaller power envelope - all at a cost-effective price point."

The Internet Archive looked to Sun to help with two important technological challenges: storing massive amounts of data and ensuring this data will be preserved in the future. The non-profit organisation needed a way to parse, index and physically encode exponentially greater amounts of raw data; while, at the same time protect stored resources from damage or destruction. Data degradation and maintaining accessibility of the data in unknown future formatting were among the many challenges facing this project.

Sun worked closely with the Internet Archive to design an open and cost-effective solution that met their needs. Using the Sun MD platform as the basis of their data centre, Internet Archive made the switch from their customized hardware and storage to industry standard Sun Fire x4500 systems running Solaris 10 and Solaris ZFS. Sun also agreed to host and manage the data centre on Sun's Santa Clara campus and will provide the power, cooling and networking capabilities.

"No company can match the storage innovation that is coming out of Sun right now", stated Brewster Kahle. "Putting Sun's highly dense storage technology into a modular data centre gives us the performance and efficiency we need at a low price point."