Tape storage at NSC

NSC is part of the SNIC tape infrastructure.

Tape storage is used for long time archive and backups.

The MARS system, a specialized database for meteorological data originally developed at ECMWF, has been customized by NSC and SMHI and was taken in operation at NSC in 2010. Similar to the setup at ECMWF, MARS at NSC is backed by the tape storage and it currently stores 1,310 TiB of data.

To offload volume data from SMHI’s Lustre-based cluster mounted storage Accumulus, NSC also operates a tape backed HSM file system intended for data which cannot be stored in the MARS system. This data size currently is in the order of 2,500 TiB.

The tape storage facilities at NSC are based on an IBM TS4500 tape library installed in 2018, replacing the TS3500 initally installed in 2005. The tape library has six frames and contains about six thousand LTO cartridges. Most of the tape cartridges are LTO-5 and LTO-6 that were moved over from the old library. Migration is ongoing to LTO-7(M) and LTO-8. We have got 16 tape drives as follows

• 6 IBM LTO Ultrium 7 tape drives
• 10 IBM LTO Ultrium 8 tape drives

The tapes are under the control of the IBM Spectrum Protect software. We have got four Spectrum Protect servers with disk cache storage. The tape drives and the disk subsystems are connected via fibre channel. There are well over a hundred nodes registered with these servers.

We have remote copies of the data in cooperation with Uppsala and KTH.

Archive and backup data for various SMHI and SNIC projects/resources are stored in the tape library. It’s also used for data archiving in the WLCG project.