Patent ID: 7627617

Claim:
A system for object-based archival data storage, the system comprising: an administration interface subsystem having a graphical user interface (GUI) and a command line interface (CLI), the administration interface subsystem allowing an administrator to interface with: a policy subsystem that provides system rules for at least one of hash based integrity checking, read-only/write-ability/erase-ability control, and duplicate data treatment corresponding to files and file objects; an object-based storage subsystem connected to respective data storage devices, the object-based storage subsystem including a meta data subsystem for maintaining information about the data storage devices used by a virtual library system to store data, and the object-based storage subsystem further including an Input-Output (IO) subsystem for providing routines for reading and writing stored objects; the meta data subsystem further being configured to store meta data about files, the meta data subsystem further categorizing data into classes and mapping the classed data into policies, the meta data subsystem transmitting the policies to the policy subsystem, and the policy subsystem generating system rules in response to the policies received from the meta data subsystem; and an audit subsystem that captures and stores audit information about at least one class of data, wherein the audit subsystem captures and stores the audit information in response to a policy received from the administration interface subsystem; at least one file presentation interface that interfaces a client platform to a Virtual File System (VFS) of the meta data subsystem; and a scalable interconnect to couple the object-based storage subsystem, the administration interface subsystem, the meta data subsystem, the policy subsystem, and the at least one file presentation interface.