A mathematical framework for modeling and analyzing migration time
Feng Luan, Mads Nygård, Thomas Mestl · 2010
File format obsolescence has so far been considered the major risk in long-term storage of digital objects. There are, however, growing indications that file transfer may be a real threat as the migration time, i.e., the time required to migrate Petabytes of data, may easily spend years. However, hardware support is usually limited to 3-4 years and a situation can emerge when a new migration has to be started although the previous one is still not finished yet. This paper chooses a process modeling approach to obtain estimates of upper and lower bounds for the required migration time. The advantage is that information about potential bottlenecks can be acquired. Our theoretical considerations are validated by migration tests at the National Library of Norway (NB) as well as at our department.