EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute Opts for PoINT Archival Gateway

The tape-based object storage PoINT Archival Gateway supports EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in additionally backing up valuable research data from HDD-based object storage systems to tape media.

With this scalable storage solution, the institute is prepared for data growth.

EMBL-EBI in Hinxton, UK, currently has a dataset of about 50PB. The research institution expects this amount to grow by 1PB per month. In addition to storage on disk-based object storage systems, a copy of this data is backed up on tape. This ensures long -term retention. Also, in case primary storage systems fail, a copy of the data is available.

Previously, an in-house script was used for this replication on tape, but it did not deliver the necessary performance. Furthermore, the storage space on the tapes was not fully utilized. With PoINT Archival Gateway, EMBL-EBI has introduced an alternative. Archival Gateway is a tape-based object store that receives data via the standardized S3 interface and writes it directly to tape, enabling tape compression at drive level.

Initially, an IBM TS4500 library with six IBM TS1160 drives was used as target storage. The storage software from PoINT only required a 2U server for this. In the course of the current second project phase, the installation was extended to 12 drives and 2x2U servers. Since Archival Gateway does not need a HDD buffer to write the data to tape, the solution proves to be cost-efficient in terms of hardware usage – and this with performance values.

Another decisive factor for choosing Archival Gateway was that the software provides the standard S3 API and does not require cumbersome S3 Glacier commands. Due to the node-based architecture, capacity and performance are scalable and can flexibly meet future requirements.

“We are very satisfied with the deployment of PoINT Archival Gateway,” said Marc Riera, software development and operations – service and data management technical coordinator, EMBL-EBI. “We feel well prepared for future data growth and look forward to following the further development steps of Archival Gateway.“

PoINT Archival Gateway is a vendor-independent, software-based storage solution which also allows to combine drives of different manufacturers and generations. Thus, the solution offers EMBL-EBI the desired performance, and also future security and a high investment protection.