Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

UK NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PICKS ATEMPO TO PROTECT 20TB OF DATA

Atempo Inc announced that the Met Office, the UK's national weather service, has picked Time Navigator to protect terabytes of mission critical data generated from its continual analysis and forecast of atmospheric conditions. Time Navigator was specifically chosen to protect weather and climate-related information residing on the organization's NEC supercomputers.

The Met Office is a leading world centre for weather forecasting and climate research and works in collaboration with others in the supply of information on the weather, water, climate and related environmental issues. Much of the work of the Met Office is based on scientific information generated daily through custom applications run on two NEC supercomputers. Protecting the mass of information is a critical function of the supercomputer support team and is essential to maintaining the integrity of the weather forecasts and trend information.

Time Navigator resides on one of four Intel Itanium 2-based NEC TX7 file servers and manages the backup of two supercomputers, each consisting of 15 SX-6 nodes for a total of 36TB of data. Roughly 20TB are fully backed up once a week to a StorageTek PowderHorn silo with a current cumulative total of six thousand slots with four 9940B tape drives under ACSLS control.

"NEC examined the scope of our unique specifications featuring 64-bit processing support and file-level restore capability and NEC came back with one name: Time Navigator," said Robin Pallister, supercomputer support manager for Met Office. "We have been extremely impressed with Time Navigator's reliability and ease of use in performing backup and the restore. In fact, the intuitive user interface makes operation so easy that we expect that it will encourage previously reluctant users to backup their mission- critical data."

"For the Met Office team, the performance of the data protection software had to be equal to the remarkable performance of the supercomputers. Clearly, anything less would place their forecasting capabilities and service at risk," said Bas Broekarts, Atempo's vice president of global sales. "Using Atempo's off-the-shelf Time Navigator, we designed a data protection system capable of meeting the unique requirements of the Met Office's scientific computing demands."