 My name is Cynthia Wu, I'm a digital preservation tech specialist at the National Library of New Zealand and I'm very glad to be here today to share with you the National Libraries and Archive of New Zealand's recent journey in optimizing our digital storage to better look after the digital town in our care. Nowadays we all use some form of digital storage from CD-ROMs to USB drives to cloud storage like Google Drive. As digital storage consumers we often focus on having enough space to store our digital files, being able to retrieve the files we need whenever we want and know that the files are safe and protected in some way. The National Library is no different than that, but increasingly beneath the surface the National Library is facing a number of challenges related to digital storage. The first of these challenges is the volume of digital collections that the National Library is mandated to collect, to preserve, protect and make accessible over time. Currently we are caring for around one petabyte of data with our planned digitization projects. The library is likely to have over two petabytes of data in its care within five years. So with the volume of digital collections growing so quickly in the next five years other challenges are starting to appear. For example, how can the library protect such a large volume of digital collections and do this effectively? How do we make sure our digital storage infrastructure can actually respond to and support all the workflows the library use to fulfill these vastly different mandated functions you see on the screen here? How can the library manage the increasing digital infrastructure cost to do all these? And data sovereignty is also a really important consideration for us, particularly around Maori data sovereignty as championed by Timana Rauranga. The National Library needs to ensure its digital talent are subject to the appropriate laws and governance. So what do we do? At the end of 2015 the Department of Internal Affairs requested the National Library to look at ways to reduce its digital storage cost. So in response the library started a project in 2016 to optimize its digital storage infrastructure. So this cost savings driven project provided the opportunity for the library to introduce improvements to our digital storage and meet these challenges. That was weird. So through this project the National Library and Archives in New Zealand were both able to rationalize and replace our digital storage infrastructure with a new platform that's more flexible, scalable and organized. With this new platform we're able to divide our workflows and our digital collections into different storage buckets. This meant that any large processing operations on the digital collections won't negatively impact on each other. This division also helps us trace our digital storage footprints and cost more easily. And in the future we can grow our digital storage effectively by going horizontally, just adding more of these buckets, or vertically by adding more into these buckets. We also improved the way we protect our digital collections. The new storage platform automatically replicates our digital collections from Wellington to Auckland and additionally all our files are protected by versioning if and when they change. It also means that we have a much quicker disaster recovery time when compared to recovering from tapes. Putting aside all the improvements that we introduced, what did we learn from this project? We still need some time to really fine tune how we use the storage platform to make the most out of it and there are two different aspects to this. First we knew our workflows have really different technical requirements but then we discovered that other factors such as the size of the files and the number of files in each of the digital collections that we have and that we process could have an effect on overall workflow performance. And so it's really important for the library to really know our own workflows and all the nuances attached to them. The second thing is that we need to learn how the digital platform actually responds to these workflows and nuances. And it ensures that we can find the best way forward for our users, applications, processes and all the storage platform itself to work in complete harmony. And then naturally fine tuning and learning the technology actually take time so it's really difficult to support under the framework of project implementation. So it's important to ensure that there is ongoing commitment either from a financial or resourcing perspective to maintain these activities after the project is closed. So aside from the improvements we did generate other beneficial outcomes. We were able to significantly reduce storage costs and the same service is now available to other government agencies through infrastructure as a service. The storage platform can generate more geographically redundant copies in the future so we can have a third or fourth copies and we can operate our storage platform from our Auckland data centre if the Wellington primary data centre was lost due to disaster. Although I'm not sure I'll worry about that because I'll probably not be here. And we can also forecast and budget for additional storage and cost annually and when we have hit a certain storage threshold we can quickly add more storage but we don't have to pay for that unless we actually consume it. So what other things are on our mind with this new storage platform in the future? We'll gradually transition our applications to connect to the storage using more modernised protocols such as Amazon S3. We will also leverage this storage platform to make our digital collections more readily available to the research community so to increase our collaboration and participation in the continual generation of new knowledge. And last but not least we're also creating a framework for analysing our cost and projecting our storage capacity across the entire organisation so that we can make better plans for the future. And finally I would like to end this presentation with a quote from Albert Einstein in the middle of difficulty, nice opportunity. Thank you very much.