In early April, 2008, Information Technology Services (ITS) acquired two new Automatic Tape Library (ATL) robots. These new robots provide the advanced technology the university needs to meet the ever-expanding data storage requirements of our campus.
Types of data to be stored on the new ATLs include administrative and academic content from across the university. The ATLs will also be used to run batch jobs of large scale datasets, such as the monthly financial statements or end of semester academic reports.
In addition to the mainframe, these new robots can serve both Unix and Windows environments. They also offer 2.5 PetaBytes of storage, which is 25 times the capacity of the old IBM 3494 robot. By using the Write Once Read Many (WORM) tape cartridges preferred by many auditors, the ATLs may also help the university meet a variety of regulatory and compliance requirements.
ITS Administrative Systems has already started migrating all the data stored on the old robot to these new ATL systems. Once installation and migration are complete these new systems will have a positive and far-reaching impact on data storage capacity here at the university.
