Minnesota Supercomputing Institute Selects Active Archive

The Active Archive Alliance
announced that the Minnesota
Supercomputing Institute (MSI) has implemented a 400TB integrated tape and
disk active archive of unstructured data to accommodate the 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. Its active archive system
guarantees that its researchers will have reliable, online and access to their
archived data.

"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. 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 MSI. "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 700TB 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 400TB and is expected to increase capacity to more than 1PB 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 enable a persistent view of the data in its
archives and have fast access to the data. Other benefits of the
storage solution implemented with the T950 tape storage included
expandability and scalability as well as reliability and high 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 EVP of product management
and WW 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 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.

Full case study of this project