University of Minnesota Taps Spectra Logic’s T950 Tape Library

The University of Minnesota’s Supercomputing Institute for Advanced Computational Research is leveraging Spectra Logic’s T950 tape library to store large quantities of data to support both a National Institute of Health grant project and the University’s collaborative research data on supercomputing within the University and the state of Minnesota.

The University of Minnesota’s Supercomputing Institute applied for and won a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant for research that required a large data archive.  The Spectra T950 enterprise tape library was chosen to support the NIH project and the Supercomputing Institute’s research data due to its high density and scalability.  It provides an ideal storage platform for SGI’s DMF data archive solution.  The combination of SGI’s DMF and the Spectra T950 library offer a file-based active archive to tape to back up the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute’s research data.  The NIH Project consists of 200TB today and, when combined with the research data, the total archive is estimated to grow to more than 1PB within three years.

The Institute provides supercomputing resources and user support to faculty and their research groups.  It is a key program in the University’s broad-based digital technology effort, supporting collaborative research on supercomputing within the University and the state of Minnesota as well as education related to supercomputing and scientific computing for undergraduates and graduates.

“Receiving the NIH grant was a step forward for the Supercomputing Institute, and we needed an enterprise-class storage solution that could not only backup and archive the data for the NIH project but be partitioned to manage the backup data for nearly 9,000 Minnesota Supercomputing Institute research accounts,” says Brian Ropers-Huilman, assistant director for HPC Operations, Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at the University of Minnesota.  “Spectra’s T950 can meet both of the requirements within a single library, and better yet can easily scale with added drives, slots and a second frame to accommodate our future data needs.”

According to Spectra Logic, the T950 library offers the industry’s greatest storage density and proactive media management with solid data integrity.  Spectra’s BlueScale11 software provides the library’s core intelligence, including hardware-based data integrity verification for the archive.