UC Acquires New Tape Library Technology for UC Flex
by Dave Bosse
UCit has very recently acquired a StorageTek SL8500 Automatic Tape Library. This ATL has the capability of housing more than 300,000 tape cartridges and 2,000 tape drives and automates the tape mounting process through robotics. Our initial configuration is comprised of a modest 1,500 tape slots and eight drives, which leaves plenty of room for growth.
Automatic Tape Libraries have been around for several decades, but the SL8500 represents the very latest in ATL, tape media, tape drive, and robotics technologies. Automatic Tape Libraries are very often referred to as "tape silos" because early incarnations were large, round, and tall. The SL8500 is not round, but rather U-shaped, and utilizes four robots scurrying along the U-shaped rails, ferrying tapes to and from the drives.
The SL8500 will be utilized by the mainframe z/800 system, supporting the legacy CUFS financial system, Human Resource Management Systems, and UniverSIS, the Student Information System. In addition to the mainframe, the ATL will support myriad UCit-supported servers and other Open System solutions, including UC Flex, the financial system replacement due to replace CUFS next year. Ordinarily, the mainframe and open systems functions do not share resources, as they are so different from each other. This is an excellent example of the capability of the SL8500 to appear as two libraries to these two disparate worlds and share the robot duties between them.
The ATL will be used almost exclusively for Mission Continuity purposes, providing backup images of systems on high capacity tape cartridges - 200+ Gigabytes per tape! Some of these tapes will then be ejected from the library and stored at an off-site location, to be rotated back to the data center after a period of time. The intent is to never have to use these tapes, but should a disaster strike the data center, these off-site images would be used to recover the core data systems of the University to within hours of the disaster strike.
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