Five consortia of top level industry and research organisations awarded for the ARCHIVER tender Arkivum, GMV, LIBNOVA, RHEA Group and T-Systems are the leaders of the five projects selected via the ARCHIVER Pre-commercial Procurement Tender to design the components of its hybrid archival and preservation services. Digital Economy © Trust-IT Services On 29 January 2020, the ARCHIVER project (www.archiver-project.eu) launched its Pre-Commercial Procurement Request for Tenders with the purpose to award several Framework Agreements and work orders for the provision of R&D for hybrid end-to-end archival and preservation services that meet the innovation challenges of European Research communities, in the context of the European Open Science Cloud. The tender was closed on 28 April 2020 and 15 R&D bids were submitted by consortia that included 43 companies and organisations. The 5 best bids have been selected and have officially been announced during a Public Award Ceremony on the 8th of June, virtually hosted by Port d’Informació Científica (PIC), a member of the Buyers Group of the ARCHIVER consortium. *THE FIVE CONSORTIA* The first phase of the ARCHIVER, the Solution Design phase, is officially started. The awarded consortia will work over the next 4 months to establish a written detailed report including architecture and technical design of components of the ARCHIVER hybrid end-to-end archival and preservation services. They are presented below (in alphabetical order of the coordinator). *CONSORTIUM 1: ARKIVUM – GOOGLE* Arkivum and Google are designing and building a solution for long-term data management and online access as part of the ARCHIVER project, to address the challenges of how cloud-hosted services can be used to store, manage, preserve and provide access to petabytes scale datasets. *CONSORTIUM 2: GMV – PIQL – AWS – SafeSpring* This consortium brought together the skills of 4 companies: GMV Soluciones Globales Internet, Piql AS, Amazon Web Services and SafeSpring to develop a solution that will provide features for multi-cloud deployment (over private, public, hybrid, community and special purpose Clouds) where the final user will be able to choose which cloud provider they want to use for their storage. The preservation layer will enhance Piql software on top of Archivematica. The solution will operate with volumes of hundreds of TBs providing preservation user services. Access and permission management against repositories and various collections will be also supported by the Federated Identity and Access Management schemes. *CONSORTIUM 3: LIBNOVA – CSIC – University of Barcelona – Giaretta Associates* LIBNOVA teamed up with CSIC, the University of Barcelona and Giaretta Associates to provide a Research, Management and Preservation Platform combining existing technologies and new components, to solve obstacles for research dataset management (including preservation) identified in the ARCHIVER project. LIBNOVA was already creating its research data preservation platform (LIBSAFE Research), that this project will help in improving and completing. *CONSORTIUM 4: RHEA System Spa – DEDAGROUP – GTT* The solution proposed by the Consortium led by RHEA Group partnering with DedaGroup and GTT addresses business requirements and challenges raised by the Buyers Group under strong regulations (Energy and Life Sciences domain) and supports testing and validations of IT infrastructures, applications, services and change control processes. A multidisciplinary Long-Term Preservation Platform for Science Heritage will be implemented in compliance with applicable guidelines and standards for data archiving and preservation, integrating vertical open sources and innovative components for the scope of the ARCHIVER project. *CONSORTIUM 5: T-Systems International – GWDG – Onedata* T-Systems’ team is complemented by partners GWDG and Onedata. They will provide research organisations and the European Science community with an OAIS-compliant data preservation solution, that is open, easy-to-use, extendable, cost- and energy-efficient. The solution follows a full open-source and cloud-agnostic approach, building on pre-existing and proven components for data preservation, data and workflow management. FIND OUT MORE HERE: https://www.archiver-project.eu/design-phase-award/ Keywords Archiving, ARCHIVER, DATA STORAGE, Data services, DATA SOLUTIONS
