Magnetic tape storage units

Tender description

The purpose of this Invitation to Tender (ITT) is for ECMWF to enter into a long-term contract for the procurement of Automated Tape Libraries (ATLs), tape drives and media to replace its existing Oracle SL8500 libraries and associated T10000 tape drives. The ITT will also include commissioning, training of ECMWF staff and maintaining the hardware and software. ECMWF’s two data archives are based on HPSS (High Performance Storage System) software and underpinned by a large capacity automated tape library infrastructure. The archives hold 250 petabytes of primary data and the expectation is that by the end of 2022 they will have grown to hold well over one exabyte of data, with a further 300 petabytes of data held for disaster recovery purposes. The archives are very busy, most of their activity is responding to read workloads from the HPC systems. However, almost 300 terabytes of new data is being added per day, and it is expected that daily growth will be more than a petabyte per day in 2022. For both reading and writing workloads the current libraries routinely perform 15 000 - 20 000 exchanges per day. Further details on activity will be provided in the ITT. The intention is to move to a new tape library environment that supports IBM TS11xx and LTO drive types. TS11xx will be the drive type for primary data, and LTO for secondary data. ECMWF is seeking to enter into a long term relationship for the supply of libraries, drives and media for this new tape environment with an initial installation of equipment at the Centre's Shinfield Park site (United Kingdom) followed by further tranches of equipment for ECMWF's new data centre in Bologna, Italy, expected from 2020.