Wester said that the administration has already acquired the necessary hardware and is close to finishing development.
Its scalability will be essential, Wester said, and its future record holding capacity will be similar to that of the Census Bureau.
“We need to figure out how to manage electronic records in ways that don’t require us to move them around physically, because we’re still in the physical moving business,” said Wester. “We need to figure out how to use different technologies, different policies, the cloud.”
The administration will use the archive to file records from federal intelligence and military agencies, particularly ones involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To ensure security, “all of the… documentation with those records, in that classified instance will be separate from the system itself,” said Wester.