SDSC’s Tape-based Archival Storage Capacity Increased a Total 36 Petabytes (PB), or 36 thousand trillion bytes of information.

The upgrade maintains the university’s standing as having the largest archival storage capacity of any educational institution in the world. SDSC entered production with 32 x IBM EU6 (TS1130) tape drives to support its archival storage systems (HPSS and SAM-QFS). The IBM System Storage TS1130 Tape Drive provided higher densities on the tape cartridges, giving SDSC the ability to store up to one terabyte (TB) of uncompressed data per cartridge, up from 700 gigabytes (GB). With a native data rate of 160 megabytes per second (MB/s), storage backups could completed up to 54 percent faster than the previous- generation drive E05 (TS1120).  With these changes, SDSC’s archival tape storage capacity was increased by 43 percent, to 36 petabytes from 25 petabytes. To put that in perspective, 36 PB is approximately 1,400 times the digital plain-text equivalent of the entire printed collection residing in the Library of Congress.