CASE STUDY
Los Alamos National Laboratory
LANL: Protecting the world with invaluable data supported by archive solution from Spectra
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Spectra TFinity ExaScale Tape Library
Overview
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory founded in 1943. The Lab’s mission is to develop and apply science and technology to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent; reduce global threats; and solve other emerging national security and energy challenges. LANL applies the best scientific and engineering solutions to the national security mission and to many of the world’s most difficult challenges.
LANL’s high performance computing resources depend on an available and performant archival system. LANL uses the Spectra TFinity system for long-term archival of data and Spectra has assisted LANL in migration of data to new TFinity tape libraries.
— David Bonnie, Future Archives Technical Lead, Los Alamos National Laboratory
The Challenge
LANL is tasked with guaranteeing paramount information retention as part of its nuclear stockpile stewardship mission. New nuclear weapons have not been developed in the United States since the early 1990s, and research at Los Alamos must be conducted without the use of nuclear testing, meaning the data they store may never be re-created. In their protective archive tier, data must be stored forever or until someone willingly deletes it, which typically means that data is stored for multiple years. When the time came to bring in new computing machines into their facilities, LANL faced a considerable challenge: to move the entire tape storage infrastructure to a new location.
The Solution
Los Alamos National Laboratory chose to replace their previous archive with the Spectra® TFinity® ExaScale Tape Library. Because the TFinity is compatible with Oracle® T10000 enterprise tape technology, LANL was able to repurpose their existing tape drives and media, as well as deploy additional LTO tape technology. LANL and Spectra Logic worked closely to test and integrate the transferred tape drives so that the data migration could be completed in the expected time frame and with minimal interruption to users. At the end of the day, users were able to continue normal operations, entirely unaware of the migration. LANL now has four Spectra TFinity tape libraries across three different data centers. The libraries meet LANL’s constant availability requirements and provide scalable, cost-effective storage to support Los Alamos’ high-impact research well into the future.
Environment Snapshot
- 14-frame Spectra® TFinity Tape Library with 28 LTO-7 and six LTO-8 tape drives>
- 12-frame Spectra® TFinity Tape Library with 80 LTO-8 tape drives
- Five-frame Spectra® TFinity Tape Library with 26 LTO-8 tape drives
- 10-frame Spectra® TFinity Tape Library with Oracle T10K tape drives
- BlueScale® Software with standard encryption
- HPSS and IBM Spectrum Protect software
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