The centre's storage capacity consists of more than one Petabyte (1 Petabyte = 1.000 Terabytes = one million Gigabytes, GB), with the possibility of a twofold increase in this capacity each year to meet the needs of scientists managing large volumes of data such as those generated by the CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Currently we have 48 SunFire X4500 units (also known as thumpers), offering approximately 1200 Terabytes of net data (1800T gross). By the end of the summer, this capacity will be enhanced to 3 Petabytes net by the addition of two S2A equipments from DataDirect Networks.
Regarding tape storage, we have available two robots: an IBM TS3500 with two different tape technologies: LTO-3 and LTO-4, and a StorageTek SL8500 with two tape technologies: 9940B and LTO-4, for a grand total of 2,75 Petabytes of tape storage. As an orientation of what one PetaByte of data means, if you burn all that data in conventional DVDs, the stack will be more than 250 meters high (more than 210.000 DVDs!).
To calculate over all that data, we use the data transformers, which read the stored data, do some kind of calculation over the data, and writes the processed information back to the storage system. For that purpose we have around 1.500 cores in a batch system. Most of those nodes are HP Blade BL460c using a HP c7000 enclosure.
