Tape Libraries (Automated Cartridge Systems)

 Tape libraries are the most cost-efficient technology in terms of TCO and capacity, but with the drawback of a very high latency. It's designation is to store cold data, which will be read very seldom or may be never.

We use it in our storage hierarchy for three central services.

• Backup and Restore of data
• Long term archival of data

• Migration of active (online) data to less expensive storage media

  • User data in the GPFS archive file systems of the HPC-systems are automatically migrated to tape by the HSM (Hierarchical Storage Manager) component of TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager). The selection criteria for the migration are age and size of a file. The user data will be recalled automatically and transparently for the user when they are accessed.
  • Project related data in the dCache-System are automatically migrated to tape by the TSM-HSM API interface of the Pool servers. The data will be recalled automatically and transparently for the user when they are accessed.

Users of the HPC systems, workstations and PCs have access to their data (Backup, Archive, Migration) in the libraries during 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.