HPCwire: Minnesota Supercomputing Institute Deploys 400 terabyte Archive

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June 18, 2012

Minnesota Supercomputing Institute Deploys 400 terabyte Archive

BOULDER, Colo., June 18 -- The Active Archive Alliance announced today that the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) has implemented a 400 terabyte integrated tape and disk active archive of unstructured data to accommodate the exponential growth of user data that needs to be stored and retrieved each year. MSI is a research community of approximately 3,000 users accessing and storing large volumes of content on a regular basis. MSI’s active archive system guarantees that its researchers will have reliable, online and efficient access to their archived data.

“We manage and store large volumes of data so it was important to select a file archive solution that is scalable and can grow as our capacity needs increase,” said Jeff McDonald, assistant director for HPC Operations at Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. “Equally important, we needed a system that provides a high level of data reliability and good metadata management to make it easy to find the data upon request for retrieval.”

The MSI active archive solution includes the Spectra Logic T950 enterprise tape library, with one partition connected to a 700 TB SGI CXFS shared file system using SGI DMF for file archive storage, and a second partition connected to MSI’s existing Sun ZFS file system and NetApp disk storage using a Tivoli client for data backup to tape. Since the initial implementation of its active archive solution, the tape library has grown from 300 to 400 terabytes and is expected to increase capacity to more than 1 petabyte within the next six months as additional online storage is required.

By applying a unified file system to expand over disk and tape library technologies, MSI can now enable a persistent view of the data in its archives and have fast, easy access to the data. Other benefits of the data storage solution implemented with the T950 tape storage included superior expandability and scalability as well as high reliability and high data storage density.

“By implementing an active archive, MSI is able to ensure high storage density, reliability and ready access to users’ nearline and archived file data in the same storage solution that is utilized for backups and data protection,” said Molly Rector, chairman of the Active Archive Alliance, and executive vice president of product management and worldwide marketing at Spectra Logic. “In addition, the T950 enterprise tape library is capable of scaling to very large capacities, and it provides industry leading density that minimizes floor space requirements.”

MSI is an interdisciplinary research program spanning all colleges of the University of Minnesota. It provides supercomputing resources and user support to faculty and their research groups. It is a key program in the University’s broad-based digital technology effort, supporting collaborative research within the University and the state of Minnesota as well as education related to supercomputing and scientific computing for undergraduates and graduates.

A full case study of this project is available online at: www.activearchive.com/education/case-studies.

The Active Archive Alliance also unveiled its new website today at www.activearchive.com. The website offers quick and easy access to useful information on active archives, including case study examples and expanded access to additional resources and contacts.

About The Active Archive Alliance
The Active Archive Alliance is a collaborative industry association dedicated to promoting active archives for simplified, online access to all archived data. Launched in early 2010 by founding technology partners Dell, FileTek, Inc., QStar Technologies, SGI and Spectra Logic Corporation, the Active Archive Alliance is a vendor neutral organization open to leading providers of active archive technologies including file systems, active archive applications, cloud storage, and high density tape and disk storage. Active Archive Alliance members provide active archive solutions, best practices, and industry testimonials so that organizations can achieve fast, online access to all their data in the most cost effective manner. Visit www.activearchive.com for more information.

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Source: Active Archive Alliance

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