Earth Sciences New Zealand is a government-funded organization formed in 2025 by merging the country’s GNS Science and NIWA agencies. Its goals range from enhancing resilience to increasing economic growth through sustainable resource management.
Our partnership with Spectra Logic is central to protecting and managing the nation's data assets so they can be reliably used at scale, including for advanced AI-driven modeling. This gives us a much stronger basis to plan, protect people and infrastructure, and make decisions with more confidence.
The Challenge
To support accurate environmental forecasting with its new supercomputer, Cascade, Earth Sciences New Zealand (ESNZ) required a scalable archive to manage petabytes of data ranging from meteorological patterns to seismic records. ESNZ’s aging IBM TS3500 tape system couldn’t meet the demands of high-throughput workflows.
The Solution
To complement Cascade, ESNZ deployed Rapids, an archive consisting of two Spectra TFinity tape libraries and Versity ScoutAM software provided by Xenon. The system can scale to 85 PB per TFinity with LTO-9 (141 PB per TFinity with LTO-10) and allows researchers to efficiently migrate, store, and retrieve over 25 years of data for training AI models.
The Result
The Spectra solution enables improved forecasting by providing access to training datasets and enabling more timely and accurate long-range predictions that improve national readiness to severe weather and a changing climate.
The Environment Snapshot
- 2x Spectra TFinity tape libraries, each with 4 frames and 4,700 slots
- LTO-9 tape media (Future plans to upgrade to LTO-10 tape media)
- Versity ScoutAM
