Abstract
Tape storage remains the most cost-effective system for safe long-term storage of petabytes of data and reliably accessing it on demand. It has long been widely used by Tier-1 centers in WLCG. GridKa uses tape storage systems for LHC and non-LHC HEP experiments. The performance requirements on the tape storage systems are increasing every year, creating an increasing number of challenges in providing a scalable and reliable system. Therefore, providing high-performance, scalable and reliable tape storage systems is a top priority for Tier-1 centers in WLCG. At GridKa, various performance tests were recently done to investigate the existence of bottlenecks in the tape storage setup. As a result, several bottlenecks were identified and resolved, leading to a significant improvement in the overall tape storage performance. These results were achieved in a test environment and introduction of these achievements in to the production environment required a great effort, among many other things, a new software had to be developed to interact with the tape management software. This contribution provides detailed information on the latest improvements and changes on the GridKa tape storage setup.
Highlights
Most Tier-1 centers in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid[1], including GridKa (German Tier-1 center in Karlsruhe) support both disk and tape storage systems
From mid-2018 to mid-2019, several performance tests were done on the GridKa tape storage system to identify bottlenecks in the setup and fix them if possible
Eliminating the discovered bottlenecks significantly improved the overall performance of the tape storage system
Summary
Most Tier-1 centers in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid[1], including GridKa (German Tier-1 center in Karlsruhe) support both disk and tape storage systems. From mid-2018 to mid-2019, several performance tests were done on the GridKa tape storage system to identify bottlenecks in the setup and fix them if possible. These tests produced the expected results and several bottlenecks were discovered and eliminated. All this work was done in a test environment and details about the results of various performance tests can be found in the proceedings of CHEP2019[2] Implementing these results in production required special efforts, such as developing new software, modifying existing configurations, replacing old hardware and upgrading network connections. The latest changes are described of this article
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