Backup system upgrades complete!  I have migrated our backup system from one capable of 342TB of cold storage to 1.4PB of cold storage, expandable in the future.  This expansion is easily realized using additional tape slots.

For the new system, I considered a number of options, including disk-based and cloud-based backups.  With the recent influx of malware and cryptoware, it was determined that backed up data is much safer in a cold medium such as tape, vs a hot medium like disk.  Cloud-based backup is economical from a backup point of view, but should the need to restore ever arise, costs for downloading and restoring an entire backup server are astronomical.  This was compared to the 6 year lifespan for a typical tape backup robot.

The new solution will provides a server with 8TB of staging space, while also providing faster disks.  This is important for a number of reasons.  Our new LTO-7 drives write data much faster, and also have a capacity of 6.0TB per tape, uncompressed.  We will have the same slot configuration — 228 robotically automated slots.

We plan to add more LTO-7 drives in the future for increased concurrency.  The disk/spool storage is also expandable in this design, should the need arise to have larger spooling capacity.

Now that this system is in place, I will begin to add some new and larger storage systems.  These will be beneficial particularly for cryoem and xray data as these sets continue to grow in resolution.  New storage arrays have already shipped from the vendor and will be integrated over the coming weeks.

Happy Computing.