System Architecture

Tape Library

Jade is made up of a single Spectra TFinity library. This 5-frame library is capable of holding over 10PB of replicated data, leveraging 32 TS1140 tape drives to transfer data to thousands of TS1140 (4TB) tapes.

The ScoutAM software allows section sizing media into chunks to mitigate writing small files to tape. While this helps the library handle smaller files, large files are strongly recommended. Quotas enforce a large average file size 100MB.

Jade Servers

A single Dell Poweredge R750 server form Jade’s server infrastructure.

The node connects via direct Fibre Channel (FC) connections to the tape drives. The node is also connected at 2 x 10GbE to the ACHE archive network.

Disk Cache

The archive disk cache is where all data lands to be ingested or extracted from the archive. This is currently comprised of 8 internal NVME SSDs, with an aggregate capacity of ~42TB.

Cluster Export Nodes

The tape archive is mounted via NFS onto the Globus export nodes directly, so they have direct access to the archive.

System Architecture Diagram

Jade architecture diagram showing the tape library connected to the Jade servers. The Jade servers are also connected to the disk cache and the storage ethernet aggregate. The Storage ethernet aggregate is also connected to the cluster export notes, NPCF core, and NCSA center-wide filesystem.