Scholarly Data Archive (SDA)
The Scholarly Data Archive (SDA) The Indiana University Scholarly Data Archive (SDA) provides extensive capacity (approximately 79 PB of tape overall) for storing and accessing research data. The SDA is a distributed storage service co-located at IU data centers in Bloomington and Indianapolis, providing IU researchers with large-scale archival or near-line data storage, arranged in large files, with two copies of data made by default (for disaster recovery).
The SDA is based on the High Performance Storage System (HPSS), a consortium-developed hierarchical storage management (HSM) package that makes the SDA’s hierarchy of storage media transparent to its users. The SDA’s system architecture comprises fast, efficient disk cache front-end components that move infrequently accessed data to two high-end tape libraries. Using the I-Light high-performance network between IUB and IUPUI, the SDA creates two tape copies of user data simultaneously (one at each data center), adding a degree of disaster tolerance to both sites.
The SDA is well suited for storing large volumes of data (that is, tens of gigabytes to several terabytes per project), and data that are accessed relatively infrequently (archival or near-line storage). The SDA backend is not designed for storing a large number of small files. Individual files should be at least 1 MB. If you need to store many small files on the SDA, use a file compression utility (gzip, tar, or zip) to bundle your files into a single, large archive file.
The SDA supports high-performance access methods, such as the Hierarchical Storage Interface (HSI); an HPSS API is available for programmers, as well.
Read More: https://kb.iu.edu/d/aiyi