The traditional solutions are to buy more disk space, or to store the data on magnetic tapes and retrieve it as needed with manual operator assistance. UVa provides an HSM as an alternative to these. The HSM is available to UVa faculty and staff. The HSM consists of an IBM 3494 tape robot controlled by an RS6000 model F50 running Tivoli Storage Manager software. The system uses robotics for automatic retrieval and storage of tapes.
Files are copied to tape in a migration process which is invisible to the user.
The recall may take several minutes while a tape is mounted by the robot, the tape is positioned, and the file is copied to disk. The HSM should NOT be used to to store collections of small files. Instead, the small files should be combined into a single large file for storage - see the example using tar in Using the HSM . Otherwise, extremely long delays may be experienced when attempting to access the files because a separate recall from tape operation may be necessary for each file. The HSM should not be used to store files that are used regularly.