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by Lynda Lester
The NCAR MSS is now storing in
excess of 1 petabyte of data in more than 16 million files. SCD invided
NCAR/UCAR staff to celebrate the historic milestone at a "Petabyte
Party," which was held on 14 February 2003 in the Foothills Laboratory
cafeteria atrium.
   
    
    
    
The MSS exceeded the 1-petabyte milestone on 23 November 2002. (This figure includes total data stored, including duplicate copies.) The total number of unique bytes stored at that time was 589 terabytes, contained in more than 16 million files.
The NCAR MSS started out in 1986 with 2 terabytes of data
offloaded from its predecessor, the TeraBit Memory (TBM) system. Eleven
years after it went into production in May 1987, the MSS reached the 100-terabyte
milestone—but it took only two months to add the last 100 terabytes.
The MSS's total net growth rate in January 2003 was 68 terabytes. At that rate, the second petabye will be reached in February 2004. Thus, while it took nearly 16 years to reach the first petabye, it will take only 16 months to reach the second one.
The reason for this meteoric rise in storage rate is that the amount of data archived in the MSS is directly proportional to NCAR's supercomputing capacity. The acquisition of the Advanced Research Computing System (ARCS) has dramatically increased NCAR's supercomputing capacity—hence the rapidly increasing amount of archived data.
Projecting out to 2005, the MSS could be growing at the rate of 2.5 petabytes per year.
Where will NCAR store all this data? Enhancements in storage technology from StorageTek and other vendors are expected to keep this problem manageable.
See also ...
See also the SCD photo of the week for 27 February 2003, "MSS passes petabyte milestone," which shows MSS support staff at the Petabyte Party.
For more information on the MSS, including diagrams, photo tours, and documentation, see http://www.scd.ucar.edu/main/mss.html
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