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Our project team included metadata experts who led the definition of technical and administrative metadata used to search federated content, create retention policies, and route objects to tiered storage. Additionally, we wanted to demonstrate how the use of metadata is instrumental in the lifecycle management of data saved into our storage cloud. Another key component of the Archival Storage Prototype project was to test and demonstrate XAM capabilities for enhanced storage management. The project team focused on our tier 2 (fixed content) storage service using XAM as the framework to access private cloud storage targets to save, manage, and retrieve fixed content objects and associated metadata. Fundamental to the Storage Services Gateway, was the development of a REST API that is capable of performing XAM translations when utilizing our storage cloud. REST is a well-established software architecture for many web developers and is common in software repositories, therefore enhancing adoption of the XAM protocol with little change to existing code or skill sets.
To test our RESTful implementation of our XAM aware Storage Service Gateway, we chose to "bolt on" Fedora 3.2.1 and utilize its REST API's and ability to access external control groups by referencing content from within our Storage Service cloud of storage arrays. In addition to pulling the actual saved objects into Fedora for management and viewing, we were also able to show list XAM generated metadata within Fedora such as the XAM assigned unique id and ingest times and dates.