This award will be used to acquire, deploy and maintain an extensible petascale storage instrument, the Oklahoma PetaStore that combines disk and tape, to enable faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates across Oklahoma to build large and growing data collections. The focus is on equipment into which many media (tape cartridges and disk drives) can be placed, funding far more slots than media, so that research teams can purchase their own media, allowing capacity to grow with OU's and Oklahoma's evolving and emerging needs. The Petastore will be provided to OSCER's ~650 users, for most at no usage charges (just media costs), not just at OU, but at 23 other Oklahoma institutions and to ~150 out-of-state and international collaborators. Additional research projects will arise over the PetaStore's lifetime, as has happened with OSCER's compute resources.
The Oklahoma PetaStore is a research data archive at the University of Oklahoma (OU), developed, acquired and maintained by the OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER), a division of OU Information Technology. The PetaStore provides over 800 TB of disk capacity and multiple Petabytes (thousands of TB) of tape capacity. It currently serves over two dozen research teams, most of them from OU and a few from other institutions across the state. Current storage consumption is over 1 PB. The PetaStore's innovative business model draws on funding from three sources: (1) National Science Foundation grant funds purchased the bulk of the hardware, software and the first 3 years of warranty; (2) ongoing institutional commitment from OU, specifically OU's Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Vice President for Research, covers space, power, cooling, labor (a new position was created and is being sustained), and maintenance after the initial warranty expired (already being covered by OU's CIO); (3) individual research teams purchase their own storage media (specifically tape cartridges), which the OSCER team imports into the PetaStore tape library and maintains over the lifetime of the system. In addition, OU has developed an innovative approach to sustaining the research teams' investments in tape media: the next generation PetaStore is planned to be compatible with the current tape cartridge format (Linear Tape Open, a common tape cartridge format with over 80% of the entire worldwide tape market, specifically LTO versions 5 and 6). Therefore, after a period of copying user files from the current PetaStore to its successor, all tape media in the current PetaStore will be able to be exported from the current PetaStore and then imported into the successor system, extending the tape cartridges' useable lifetimes by 5 to 10 additional years. Because LTO-5 tape cartridges are rated for the earlier of 15 years, 5000 load/unload cycles or 200 entire tape read/writes, the expected lifetime of a PetaStore tape cartridge is anticipated to be at least 10 years.
