Alba Synchrotron Installed Overland LTO-5 Library With Atempo Software

Overland Storage announced that the ALBA synchrotron light facility has installed a NEO 8000e tape library from Overland to store scientists' research data.

 

Using the NEO 8000e, installed by Spanish reseller Flytech, the facility has reduced storage costs and ensured that its vital data can be housed for the long-term without any need for forklift upgrades.

Based in Barcelona, ALBA is a world-renowned synchrotron light facility, generating electromagnetic radiation that helps scientists to understand the inner structures of particles. Using its facilities, research groups from all over the world carry out cutting-edge experiments across all scientific fields, from material stress tests in manufacturing to analysing bone growth in medicine.

These experiments generate an enormous amount of data. ALBA's detectors can produce 300MB every second, with tests lasting several minutes at a time. The facility currently runs seven separate synchrotron experiments per day, generating a vast amount of raw data to be stored. This amount will grow even further in the next few years as the number of experiments increases to thirty per day. To meet these huge storage needs, ALBA holds its primary data on a 250TB BlueArc/Hitachi storage cluster.

With demands on the primary storage increasing, performance degrading and the cost of buying more disk storage prohibitive, ALBA needed a cost-effective solution to free up space on its primary storage and keep experiment data safe for future reference. To meet these requirements, ALBA turned to Flytech, and after consideration of a number of top vendors, the clear choice was the Overland Storage solution in combination with the Atempo Digital Archive application.

ALBA now frees up primary storage space by archiving 250TB of data to tape after a period of two months. In total, the NEO 8000e, based on the latest LTO-5 technology, stores up to 1.5PB of archive data. By holding this data on the Overland library, ALBA has avoided the purchase of two additional disk storage devices. This saved ALBA thousands, in both drive costs, and with the energy efficiency that NEO 8000e offers over similarly sized disk-based solutions, in power costs as well. With scalable capacity up to 3PB, the Overland library will save ALBA from additional storage investments for a long while.

A further, vital benefit of the Overland solution is its ability to keep older data easily accessible and secure for scientists who want to revisit their previous experiments. The integrated partitioning feature of the NEO 8000e allows ALBA to allocate partitions to either backup or archiving tasks without requiring additional hardware, while its ability to eliminate single points of failure avoids costly downtime. Researchers know that their data will be protected even in the event of drive failure, and will be easily accessible as and when they require it.

"As soon as Flytech demonstrated the benefits of the Overland solution, we were sure that the experiments performed here at ALBA would continue without fear of data loss and spiraling storage costs," said Joachim Metge, Head of System Section, ALBA. "Being able to transfer so much data to tape but maintain data availability has saved us an enormous upgrade on disk storage, while its ability to keep data archived and readily available within the same unit is a huge weight off our minds. Ultimately this makes the work of our visiting scientists easier and less risky, and when your work is as important as the studies carried out here, eliminating these risks is absolutely crucial."

"Organisations like ALBA produce data that must be safely retained for future use, but are also looking to achieve this without suffering exorbitant costs," said Peri Grover, Director, Product Marketing. "The NEO 8000e tape library provides the ease of use and flexibility that enterprises demand to implement a long-term data storage policy. This not only reduces costs, but also streamlines the management of information by allowing it to be accessed more readily and securely."