HPCx Tape Archive

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HPCx Tape Archive

• Andrew Sunderland
• HPCx Terascaling Team

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Summary of Tape Archive

• HPCx has 100 TBytes of storage
• 30 TBytes high-speed disk ( GPFS ) (expensive)
• 70 TBytes offline tape storage (inexpensive)
• Access using Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)
• Users who create large amounts of data can
  benefit from archiving data to tape
• e.g. huge data sets that are not accessed
  frequently.
• Access to TSM both through GUI and command line.
• Archiving on HPCx must be enabled for your
  project
• Tape resources managed by PI.
• Same as disk resources
• No individual user quotas

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Your Project and TSM
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Archiving and Retrieving Files

• Command Line Mode
• Archiving
• rdsmc archive subdiryes descNi3 data
  HOME/data/ni3/
• Retrieving
• rdsmc retrieve subdiryes descNi3 data
  HOME/data/ni3/ NewDir/
• Querying
• rdsmc query archive subdiryes
  HOME/data/ni3/

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Interactive Mode

• To start interactive mode enter
• rdsmc inter
• This will change the prompt to
• tsmgt
• To exit interactive mode type
• tsmgtquit
• Use the interactive mode when you want to issue a
  series of commands.
• Connects to server only once, therefore more
  efficient than batch mode.

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Motif-GUI access to TSM
To start the Motif GUI enter dsm
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Motif-GUI for the TSM
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TSM Summary

• 70 Tbytes of tape archive available on HPCx.
• Projects need to set up tape access through their
  PI
• Usage can be checked through user SAF.
• Cheaper, larger capacity and safe alternative to
  GPFS for files that dont need accessing
  frequently.
• Access through command-line mode, interactive
  mode and GUI.
• Many more options for TSM on HPCx than presented
  here
• e.g. verbose,showdetail,nodeletefiles,replace,ifne
  wer
• Detailed description of TSM usage available in
  HPCx Technical Report HPCxTR0405.