This paper is intended to address the challenges of designing a reliable long term archiving storage architecture regardless of types of digital objects needing to be stored. While the digital object types and properties should be considered when determining the storage components of the architecture, the object characteristics are not as important as the access and preservation requirements.The first step to building a long term archive storage architecture is the assessment of the business processes. Incorporating the business process into your architectural design is crucial to the overall success of the long term archive. The only way to ensure an appropriate architecture is to understand the business processes. Documenting your organizations policies and procedures including data types, length of archive, access methods, maintenance activities, and technical specifications will increase the probability your archive architecture will meet the business requirements.Whether you are building your archive for historical preservation or to store data for business compliance, a tiered storage architecture can provide you with the most reliable and cost effective solution. Regulations often require that information be located and retrieved very quickly. If architected incorrectly, data searching and retrieval can be time consuming and costly. Traditional tape only archival methods simply can not meet the access requirements of many of today's repositories and long term archives. Likewise, storing all your data on disk requires greater administration and is more costly. The proposed tiered storage architecture provides a balance between disk and tape storage hardware to support long term archiving.A reliable long term archive is also dependant on the software components being open and supporting interoperability. Storing, searching, and retrieving data is not sufficient criteria for a successful long term archive. A long term archive should incorporate open source standards based software to ensure future support.The overall storage system architecture addresses the physical storage components and processes for long-term preservation. Key components to address when architecting your long-term archive are security, storage, and application interoperability. The security layer focuses on the data access in order to ensure integrity and privacy. Storage addresses the placement of the objects within the various hardware components based on retention policies. Application interoperability is the systems and applications ability to be backward compatible as well as the ability to support expanded system functionality.