The Long haul

Long Moua of SCD's Network Engineering and Telecommunications Section pulls fiberoptic cable to permanently connect four StorageTek 9940 tape drives to SCD supercomputers and file servers. The drives were attached to the MSS silos and connected using temporary fibreoptic cables in December, and SCD's MSS Group has been working since then on software modifications to integrate the new drives into the MSS system.

SCD will invite friendly users to test the drives in April, and hopes to release the drives for use by the larger user community in May.

By the end of September, SCD will install additional STK 9940 drives, which handle tapes with a capacity of 60 gigabytes of data per cartridge. The new drives will replace 18 old STK Redwood drives, whose tapes have a capacity of only 50 gigabytes per cartridge.

Photo: Lynda Lester/SCD