The IN2P3 Computing Center (or CC-IN2P3) is a CNRS Support and Research Unit (UAR6402) attached to IN2P3, the institute that develops and coordinates research in particle physics, nuclear physics and astroparticle physics. National research infrastructure, the CC-IN2P3 designs and operates a set of services, in particular a mass storage system and means of processing large masses of data. The CC-IN2P3 has two computer rooms (850 m2 each) hosting several thousand servers and libraries allowing the storage of nearly 340 Petabytes of data on magnetic tapes.
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In a recent twitter thread (translated below from French to English) IN2P3 shared their migration to a Spectra TFinity tape library:
| The evolution of our tape storage media continues today with the decommissioning of a new Oracle SL8500 tape library. |  |
| Data from experiments are progressively transferred to Jaguar IBM 3592 tapes and installed in the Spectra TFinity tape library. |  |
| More capacitive [sic], they can each store up to 20TB of data and are now stored in a more compact tape library. A change that should allow us to calmly consider the future increase of our storage capacities. And thus meet the ever-increasing needs of major scientific programs. |  |
The CC-IN2P3 participates in around fifty experiments of international scope and holds a prominent place with the major physics experiments for which it manages the data. In particular, it is one of the 14 main international centers for processing data generated by the experiments installed on the LHC accelerator at CERN (in Geneva), where the new elementary particle, the Higgs Boson, was discovered. It also provides computing resources to the VIRGO gravitational wave experiment. The next challenges of CC-IN2P3 concern in particular the processing of data from the future High Luminosity LHC project at CERN, the new SPIRAL 2 particle accelerator at GANIL, the BELLE II detector in Japan, but also promising astrophysical projects, such as the future LSST telescope, the European EUCLID satellite or even CTA.
Spectra’s TFinity ExaScale is the world’s highest capacity tape library. With unsurpassed storage density packaged in the smallest footprint of any enterprise library on the market, the TFinity offers industry-leading scalability with the speed necessary to meet requirements of the most demanding environments. Today with TFinity ExaScale, Spectra is the only company offering support for all major tape technologies, also including Oracle® T10000x technology, in one library – a tri-media revolution. This gives organizations the ability to switch vendors, if needed, and migrate existing data to their technology of choice. Spectra also supports object storage with LTFS making your archives non-proprietary.
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