The Australian Antarctic Division is seeking to upgrade its network storage system. The scientific organisation, which is a division of the federal department of the environment, is grappling with an explosion of data, with production data growing at rate of 60 per cent per year since 2007.
Currently the organisation is managing some 95 terabytes of production data.
Within five years, the organisation expects to be dealing with 335TB of production data; an annual growth rate of 30 per cent.
The Antarctic Division is seeking an integrated storage system, including backup and archiving, that can support its growing cohort of data for the next half decade.
According to tender documents lodged by the organisation, its current backup infrastructure, which is based on tape, is inadequate.
The volume of data has reduced full backup frequency to a weekly, monthly or quarterly schedule, depending on the amount of change, the documents state. The limitations of its infrastructure and management overhead mean that the current setup is "unsustainable".
A business continuity site is currently been commissioned for the organisation. The new site will be 30 kilometres from the organisation's headquarters in Kingston, Tasmania, and will house backup and archiving infrastructure. It will be connected back to the AAD's offices by 10Gbps fibre.
The Antarctic Division currently uses CommVault software to manage its backups, and new storage infrastructure will have to be compatible.