From setback to a comeback

Challenge

The University of Tasmania has stored research data at scale since the 1990s. Over that time, clusters of small files had started to become a big data problem, limiting the University’s data storage capability. What’s more, a devastating flood had damaged its infrastructure. A new future-proof Research Data Management System was needed.

Solution

Atos was engaged to implement a High-Performance Storage System (HPSS), the product of a 26-year collaboration between IBM and five national laboratories of the US Department of Energy. HPSS is a network-centered, cluster-based software offering that provides for stewardship and access of petabytes of data. HPSS is able to easily meet otherwise unachievable demands of total storage capacity, file sizes, data rates, and objects stored.

Benefits

This solution allows the University of Tasmania to store more data in a way that is safe and reliable, providing data storage, protection and a global, scalable file system organisation for billions of directories and files. The new storage system holds data not only for the University of Tasmania, but also for its close collaborators (institutes and museums).