The benefit of having your lecture recorded with CARMA is its long-term accessibility at no cost above the cost of recording. Your lecture will join the other several thousand lectures in the U-M ATLAS Lecture Archive Database, where its access is guaranteed through 2013. Furthermore, there is a good chance that your lectures will be available indefinitely.

Our archiving and streaming solution is paid for and guaranteed through February 2013, at which point we will replace all server hardware and set up a plan for the next five years. We have implemented a secure, redundant data storage solution, with the primary focus being longevity of the data.

We have installed two identical HP Proliant 360DL G5 servers in different geographic locations, each with two attached MSA20 modular storage arrays holding 24 500 GB SATA disks, for a total of 10 TB. Each MSA20 is running RAID6, which means that any two disks can fail at once with no data loss. All data is mirrored nightly between the two servers. This means that In the case of catastrophic failure of one server, or in the case of a natural disaster, the other server will be intact and able to take over until replacement parts arrive.

Every lecture is stored as a collection of high-resolution images, video files and XML metadata files in a standard Lecture Object format in our archive, and typically takes up around 1.5 GB (1-hour lecture) in this form. This archive is protected from unauthorized access. Our software transforms this Lecture Object into multiple viewing formats, which are posted on the public web server. We are able to protect any lectures using the standard University of Michigan login, limiting access to any list of people you desire.

Total space available: 10 TB (until March 2013)
Current size of archive: 3 TB (as of March 2008)
Remaining space available: 7 TB
Average size of 1-hour lecture: 1.5 GB