Architecture
OrcaVaults is a single hardware appliance plus a single software system, deployed inside your network with no external dependencies at runtime. This page is the technical reference your IT director, your CISO and your regulator will all want to read.
Trust boundary
The entire OrcaVaults system runs inside the Customer's environment. Not in our cloud. Not behind a private link to our cloud. Not "on-prem with some helpful telemetry." Simply: on hardware your organisation owns, on a network you control.
tcpdump or your network IDSLogical architecture
Documents arrive on your storage. OrcaVaults reads them, processes them locally on your GPUs, writes outputs back to your storage, and records every action in a tamper-evident audit log on the same hardware. No part of this flow leaves your environment.
Tamper-evident audit log
The audit log is an append-only Merkle log — the same construction used by Google Certificate Transparency (RFC 6962), AWS QLDB, and Guardtime KSI (the technology behind Estonian e-government, NHS Scotland, NATO CCDCOE, and US DoD audit infrastructure).
It is not a blockchain. There is no consensus protocol, no token, no peer-to-peer network, no on-chain data. It is industrial cryptography for integrity proofs, deployed inside your network, signed by your hardware key, written to your storage. If your regulator wishes to verify the integrity of an extraction performed three years ago, they can — without trusting us, and without leaving your building.
The audit log's design specifically resolves the tension between immutability and the right to erasure. By recording only hashes and metadata, erasure of the underlying source records invalidates reverse-traceability while preserving the integrity proof — satisfying both the audit and the privacy principle.
Reference appliance
The reference appliance is delivered configured, hardened and burned-in. You may also bring your own hardware to spec — every component is industry-standard.
| Chassis | Corsair 9000D RGB Airflow Tower (or equivalent rack option) |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX — 96 cores / 192 threads · 2.5 / 5.1 GHz |
| GPU | 2× NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 96 GB GDDR7 Blackwell · 600 W each |
| Motherboard | ASUS Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE · PCIe 5.0 |
| Memory | 512 GB DDR5 5200 MHz ECC RDIMM (8 × 64 GB) |
| Storage | 2× 4 TB Samsung PM1743 NVMe PCIe 5.0 |
| Cooling | be quiet! Silent Loop 3 420 mm liquid loop |
| Power | 2000 W Seasonic PRIME TX-2000 80+ Titanium |
| Operating system | Ubuntu Server LTS, hardened per CIS benchmark |
| Approximate hardware cost | Indicative range published on /pricing — varies by configuration and exchange rate |
Full BOM, power draw in watts, BTU rating, rack U requirements, redundancy posture and warranty pass-through are documented in the Buyer Pack on the Trust Centre.
Operations
OrcaVaults runs on Ubuntu Server LTS. It uses standard Linux process isolation, standard systemd service management, standard syslog forwarding, and standard backup tooling. Your IT team does not learn a new platform.
LDAP / Active Directory / SAML integration for operator authentication. Role-based access control. All sessions logged to the audit trail.
Syslog forwarder for Customer's Splunk, Elastic or Sentinel. OS, application and audit-log streams all available.
Standard snapshot cadence guidance, RTO/RPO targets per SLA tier, and off-host backup target options to your existing storage.
Software updates delivered as signed installer packages on Customer's schedule. No automatic pulls. No silent telemetry. Each release ships with an SBOM.
Storage drives are sanitised in place per NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 1 using cryptographic erase or block-erase procedures appropriate to the drive type. Certificates of destruction are issued to Customer. No media leaves the Customer's premises during decommissioning.