USC Shoah Foundation Buys Oracle StorageTek T10000C Tape Drives

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute, established by
filmmaker and USC trustee Steven Spielberg, is dedicated to overcoming
prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry, and the suffering they cause, through the
educational use of more than 100,000 hours of visual testimonies.

At 5TB uncompressed, the StorageTek T10000C tape drive is the world’s highest
capacity drive and enables customers to boost capacity and performance while
maintaining their existing footprint. Now more than 80 percent complete, the institute’s Holocaust preservation project began in 2008 with StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System and T10000B tape drives as
the cornerstone of its architecture. The solution, which also includes
Oracle’s Sun x86 servers with Solaris and Oracle disk arrays, digitizes
approximately 80TB of data per month and is on track to finish digitization in
2013.

StorageTek T10000C Drives Increase Capacity
Help Reduce Cost by Up to 35
Percent
As part of its process, the institute upgrades its tape technology and migrates
its data on tape every three years to ensure these priceless testimonials are maintained
on the best possible technology. The frequent migrations have the added benefit
of minimizing the Institute’s storage footprint.

With the move to these latest generation tape drives, the Institute has
increased its maximum tape storage capacity over five times, up to 55PB and
saved an estimated 35 percent over the cost of staying on previous technology.

The institute is also able to take advantage of the StorageTek Maximum Capacity
feature which enables writing up to 5.5TB per tape, and the StorageTek
Accelerator feature which maximizes total data throughput by reducing tape
starts and stops, helping to accelerate project completion.

Additionally, using the T10000C in conjunction with
Oracle’s Sun Storage Archive Manager software and  Solaris, the institute
is able to check sum its files any time they are moved on the network to ensure
data integrity.

The increase in storage capacity has
also enabled the institute to begin digitizing and preserving testimonies from
the Armenian and Rwandan genocides.

"From the beginning, Oracle technology
has been critical to our mission to preserve the testimonies of Holocaust
survivors and witnesses, and provide fast and easy access to these invaluable
assets," said Sam Gustman, CTO, USC Shoah Foundation Institute. "Oracle’s StorageTek T10000C tape technology
has enabled us to ensure data integrity, archive five times more data in our
existing footprint and reduce the cost of maintaining these oral histories for
generations to come."