Multi-terabyte data storage

Temporary storage of raw data is needed on the mountain for security backup.

Requirements

Minimum six months spinning storage of all Magellan-generated data
Goal of one year's worth of storage capacity
3 years MTBF, recoverable

Discussion

The intent is to provide sufficient backup capacity to store observer's data until intitial data examination confirms that it's OK. Data may be compressed in the archive. Instruments may use this facility as their direct storage system or may have their data transferred via periodic rsync jobs.

If IMACS is capable of generating 20 GB/night (Osip, pvt. comm.) and it's used 20 nights per month, then the potential storage requirement for IMACS alone is 5 TB. Realistically, it is more likely that IMACS will not generate 20 GB/night (spectroscopy, MMTF, etc., generate smaller data sets) and won't be used 20 nights a month so we might think that 5 TB is a good range to start with. This will leave room for other existing instruments, although additional new storage will be needed when large array system such as Megacam and Fourstar appear.

Execution

Disk farm with hot-swappable drives. What raid level?

acl 2005-10-20