Backup Infrastructure

The infrastructure of the RRZ backup service is located at two sites within Hamburg. The sites are approximately 900 meters apart (aerial distance), thus providing protection against data loss even in the event of a disaster such as a building fire.

Most of the data is stored twice on magnetic tapes using tape robots. In addition to the tape robots, designated storage systems are operated for the backup service to buffer data and optimize performance. However, there are also backup procedures that use our S3 object storage as a storage target (partly in read-only buckets). This object storage is distributed across three UHH locations in Hamburg and thus also has geo-redundancy.

The primary servers of the backup service are each equipped with 2 × 40 Gb/s Ethernet and 4 × 16 Gb/s Fibre Channel to provide the required data throughput. For security reasons, administrative access to the servers is carried out via identifiers that are independent of the central directory service.

The entire infrastructure follows a scale-out architecture, so that performance can be increased linearly with additional hardware as performance requirements increase. In addition, hardware partitioning and virtualization are used to enable flexible use of the infrastructure. One example is the simultaneous use of tape robots and storage systems from different backup products.

Current performance parameters (as of 07-2023)

• Currently, ~28 tape drives are available per location.
• A total of ~10 PB of data is effectively stored in our backup.