HSM and backup services at INFN-CNAF

Abstract

IBM Spectrum Protect (ISP) software, one of the leader solutions in data protection, contributes to the data management infrastructure operated at CNAF, the central computing and storage facility of INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare – Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics). It is used to manage about 55 Petabytes of scientific data produced by LHC (Large Hadron Collider at CERN) and other experiments in which INFN is involved, stored on tape resources as the highest latency storage tier within HSM (Hierarchical Space Management) environment. To accomplish this task, ISP works together with IBM Spectrum Scale (formerly GPFS - General Parallel File System) and GEMSS (Grid Enabled Mass Storage System), an in-house developed software layer that manages migration and recall queues. Moreover, we perform backup/archive operation of main IT services running at CNAF, such as mail servers, configurations, repositories, documents, logs, etc. In this paper we present the current configuration of the HSM infrastructure and the backup and recovery service, with particular attention to issues related to the increasing amount of scientific data to manage, expected for the next years.