Analysis of the ECMWF Storage Landscape

Despite domain-specific digital archives are growing in number and size, there is a lack of studies describing their architectures and runtime characteristics. This paper investigates the storage landscape of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) whose storage capacity has reached 100 PB and experiences an annual growth rate of about 45%. Out of this storage, we examine a 14.8 PB user archive and a 37.9 PB object database for metereological data over a period of 29 and 50 months, respectively. We analzye the system’s log files to characterize traffic and user behavior, metadata snapshots to identify the current content of the storage systems, and logs of tape libraries to investigate cartridge movements. We have built a caching simulator to examine the efficiency of disk caches for various cache sizes and algorithms, and we investigate the potential of tape prefetching strategies. While the findings of the user archive resemble previous studies on digital archives, our study of the object database is the first one in the field of large-scale active archives.