Ranch

Long Term Archival Storage

TACC's High Performance Computing (HPC) systems are used primarily for scientific computing and while their disk systems are large, they are unable to store the long-term final data generated on these systems. The Ranch archive system fills this need for high capacity long-term storage, by providing a massive high performance file system and tape-based backing store designed, implemented, and supported specifically for archival purposes.

The 2025 Ranch system has a 4PB flash front end disk system from Dell, with a 16PB Dell ECS storage system as an extended disk cache, and two Spectra Logic 15 frame TFinity tape libraries for back end storage. We currently have 20 LTO-9 tape drives, but we will swap in 16 LTO-10 drives in the near future. The front end flash system has Versity’s ScoutFS (SCale-OUT File System) filesystem on it. The archive management is done by Versity’s ScoutAM (SCale-OUT Archival Manager) product.

Our 2019 to 2025 Ranch system, which will remain as a NFS mounted source for data migration until at least November 2026, has a frontend DDN SFA14K DCR (Declustered RAID) storage system, which is managed by Quantum’s StorNext file system. The raw capacity is approximately 30PB, of which 17PB is user-facing. File metadata is stored on a Quantum SSD-based appliance. The back-end tape library, to which files automatically migrate after they have been inactive (neither modified nor accessed) on disk for a period of time, is a Quantum Scalar i6000, with 24 LTO-8 tape drives. Each tape has an uncompressed capacity of approximately 12.5TB.

Users are cautioned that Ranch contains only a single copy of any user's data. Ranch is a very large-scale archival system, and the data within it is not backed up or replicated. While best practices and best effort have always been brought to bear to support Ranch and the integrity of the user data within it, it is not a data backup/restore environment. Ranch is not designed, maintained, or supported to provide the sole storage location for user data.

If a higher integrity long-term archive is required, please contact TACC support.

System Specifications

The new Ranch HSM environment that has been incorporated with the existing HSM Ranch configuration is comprised of the following components: Centos-based user-facing login and GridFTP servers; Quantum StorNext File System and Storage Manager HSM software; 20 PB of IB connected DDN-based user-facing POSIX file systems; 24 LTO-8 tape drives; an expandable 5000 tape cartridge library; multi-server distributed data movement capability that provides much higher performance and concurrent tape access; and a licensed file capacity of 5 billion user files.

Users are strongly reminded and cautioned that Ranch contains only a single copy of user data. Ranch is an archival system, which is not backed up or replicated. While best practices and best effort have always been brought to bear to support Ranch and the user data within it, it is not designed, maintained, or supported to provide the sole storage location for research data. If high-integrity archive is required, please contact TACC support.