Business issues
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) carries the torch for space-related scientific research. Less well known is its Center for Space Research (CSR), which studies the Earth, its environment and solar system. TACC provides advanced computing resources and services to support computationally-intensive research by the CSR and other projects like the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE).

Solutions
To ensure sufficient capacity to host massive research data sets, TACC added to its data storage infrastructure a second StorageTek PowderHorn library equipped with six StorageTek T9940B tapes drives (200 GB native capacity). TACC uses a 1.3-terabyte (TB) data cache on the front end, managed by SGI Data Migration Facility, to deliver online access speeds for current project data. Data is both backed up to, and archived to, the PowderHorns for data protection and researcher use.

Financial benefits
By migrating to T9940B tape media, the University achieved 10 times the capacity and substantially decreased their per-gigabyte storage costs from $3.35 to $0.39, an 88 percent decrease. In addition, the newly installed PowderHorn also prompted the redeployment of a smaller StorageTek legacy tape library to UT Austin's IT department. This has extended the asset's service life and reduced its total cost of ownership.

Business benefits
TACC achieved its goal of enhancing its technological infrastructure to better serve scientists in their mutual mission to advance human knowledge. Scientists can draw upon greater storage capacity, longer file residency times in cache and faster access to tape-resident data sets. The StorageTek deployment also provided the storage and backup infrastructure necessary to support TACC's goal to be a world-class academic advanced computing center.

Technology benefits
The StorageTek PowderHorn assets increased storage capacity from 132 TBs to 1.4 petabytes, a 9,600 percent increase. According to Chris Hempel, associate director of the TACC, this meets the Center's voracious capacity needs for the next few years.

Hempel is also taking advantage of StorageTek's Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) approach. He assigns small data sets (less than 1 GB) to his T9840 tape media to leverage the drive's shorter access time which is one-fifth that of the T9940. For data files exceeding 1 GB he economically stores them on T9940Bs which stream the data to end users at three times the speed of T9840s.