Policy Management
Policies in the GridBank™ Platform are operations that determine the archive-item’s behaviour during its lifecycle within the archive. Because each archive-item encapsulates its own policies, it is responsible for its own behaviour within the archive–for example, determining whether its content is authentic, or its retention period is still in force. GridBank™ policies ensure that archive data is always safe, available, and authentic.
The GridBank™ Platform object policies govern its behaviour in the archive. As a result, an archive manages itself independently of client applications.
The GridBank™ Platform supports the following policies:
Data Protection – protects the integrity of data objects, initiating repairs immediately after any hardware failure. All files stored in the GridBank™ Platform are protected by its data protection scheme. The scheme replicates archive data across different nodes in the cluster in accordance with user-specified tolerable points of failure. It then automatically reconstructs data lost due to hardware lapses.
Data Authentication – ensures that the content of a file matches its digital signature. The policy is set to a user-specified hash algorithm that is applied globally.
Data Retention – prevents premature deletion of a file. After the retention period, the data object can be purged either automatically by the application, or explicitly by the archive administrator.
Data Cluster balance – ensures that data objects are evenly distributed among all cluster nodes.
Shredding and Garbage collection – reclaims disk space by purging files that are left behind by incomplete transactions. It also checks the integrity of all system metadata. The policy is set to a pick-up time, which specifies how long data must be marked for deletion before it is removed.
Data Scavenging – ensures against loss of metadata. Internally, the archive's storage manager maintains and manages a file’s metadata and content together. This provides a layer of redundancy that the archive’s scavenging policy can use to rebuild missing or corrupt metadata.
