Ranch
Long Term Archival Storage
Beginning in the spring of 2019, Ranch is undergoing a multi-year transition from its current software and hardware suite that has served TACC for more than a decade.
Prior to the transition, the software environment has been comprised of Oracle Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) software coupled with 1TB of user-facing Dell storage and a backing tape store of approximately 160 PB. This environment currently supports 1.7 billion user files occupying approximately 35PB of backing tape storage. TACC's long-term data archive needs have been met using this HSM software that allows for POSIX compliant access to the users' data while reducing the actual storage footprint of that data on the underlying hardware.
An entirely new Ranch environment has been designed, acquired, and combined with the existing Ranch infrastructure. This amalgamated environment allows users to migrate the data they wish to retain into the new long-term archival environment, leaving behind data that is no longer of value to them.
The new Ranch HSM environment that has been incorporated with the existing HSM Ranch configuration is comprised of the following components: Centos-based user-facing login and GridFTP servers; Quantum StorNext File System and Storage Manager HSM software; 20 PB of IB connected DDN-based user-facing POSIX file systems; 24 LTO-8 tape drives; an expandable 5000 tape cartridge library; multi-server distributed data movement capability that provides much higher performance and concurrent tape access; and a licensed file capacity of 5 billion user files.
Users are strongly reminded and cautioned that Ranch contains only a single copy of user data. Ranch is an archival system, which is not backed up or replicated. While best practices and best effort have always been brought to bear to support Ranch and the user data within it, it is not designed, maintained, or supported to provide the sole storage location for research data. If high-integrity archive is required, please contact TACC support.