In this video, engineers install a Spectra Logic tape library at STFC‘s Scientific Data Centre at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. The new Spectra TFinity Tape Library has an initial capacity of 65PB, 48 Drive Bays and a mix of 17 industry open standard LTO-8 Drives and 16 TS1160 Drives; recent technology which will enable future expansion.
What do you do when you need to increase the space available for storing vast amounts of data? One solution is to install a high-capacity automated tape library, or ‘Tape Robot’. STFC’s Scientific Computing Department needed to increase its capacity for storing and managing the vast and ever-growing amounts of data from the JASMIN Facility (environment and climate data) and through IRIS (astronomy, particle physics, and data from national facilities such as ISIS Neutron Source, Diamond Light Source and the Central Laser Facility).
The extra capacity needed to be at least 60 Petabytes (PB) – the equivalent of storing more than 10 million DVDs – with the potential to increase again to meet future data demands. This system will provide for the predicted data-growth from existing groups over the next decade, and an active archive for JASMIN users and the IRIS science communities. It brings SCD’s total tape storage capacity within the RAL Scientific Data Centre to 240PB.
