Tape Library Expansion to 80 PB

In January 2011, the regular monitoring of the two JSC tape libraries predicted that the filling degree will hit 100 % (15 petabytes) in 2012. At that time, it was thought that waiting for new tape technology to become available during summer 2011 would cause no problems: 5-terabyte tapes and corresponding
tape drives were due to replace the old 1-terabyte components. For this reason, JSC contracted the upgrading of the tape libraries as soon as the new technology
was obtainable and planned to install the new tape media in September 2011.

However, as some large projects produced more data than predicted in the first six months of this year, the projected growth of user data more than doubled. This led to a severe shortage of tapes as early as the end of July. Those users with the largest amount of data had to be informed that new space would not be available until October, as it would take some time to copy the old tapes to the new larger tapes.

The tape capacity bottleneck has now been eliminated. According to plan, the first step of the upgrade was completed in the second week of September. The current tape capacity is 25 petabytes. The contract foresees the delivery of new tape media with a total capacity of 80 petabytes within the next five years. If necessary, the contract can easily be expanded to 130 petabytes. More information is available at http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/tapes.

(Contact: Lothar Wollschläger)

from JSC News No. 197, September 2011