I’m a little confused by this submission. CASTOR is the old system that has since been replaced by the CERN Tape Array since ~2020: <a href="https://cta.web.cern.ch/cta/" rel="nofollow">https://cta.web.cern.ch/cta/</a><p>This is mentioned on the page but it’s easy to miss.<p>For the current status of tape storage at CERN see: <a href="https://indico.cern.ch/event/1471803/contributions/6967379/attachments/3281280/5863828/2026-05-26_CHEP_Archiving60PBperMonthToTape_jleduc.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://indico.cern.ch/event/1471803/contributions/6967379/a...</a><p>For reference, most disk storage for physics data uses an in-house solution called EOS: <a href="https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/eos-web/" rel="nofollow">https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/eos-web/</a>
looks like the image on the right is broken, but it is supposed to be: <a href="https://cta.web.cern.ch/cta/assets/images/namespace_statistics.png" rel="nofollow">https://cta.web.cern.ch/cta/assets/images/namespace_statisti...</a><p>(looks like this submission uses <a href="https://castor.web.cern.ch/content/home.html" rel="nofollow">https://castor.web.cern.ch/content/home.html</a> instead of <a href="https://castor.web.cern.ch/castor/" rel="nofollow">https://castor.web.cern.ch/castor/</a> the second link does not have the broken image)
This is actually super useful for real world stuff. Thanks for this.<p>Tape is boring but when an intern / AI / tectonic plate accidently destroys your database setup it is a huge lifesaver<p>Anybody know what these fancy Oracle tapes are? Is it just their implementation of a regular standard?
If it's Oracle Tape, it's proprietary T10000-series 1/2in linear tape and associated drives, that they got when they absorbed Sun (and Sun got when they bought StorageTek). Multiple vendors made tape media for these, but they were not compatible w/ LTO tape nor the IBM 3590-series enterprise tape format.
See this conference talk from last week: <a href="https://indico.cern.ch/event/1471803/contributions/6967379/" rel="nofollow">https://indico.cern.ch/event/1471803/contributions/6967379/</a><p>There isn’t a recording but slides at linked from that page.
"Castor" was the name of a storage system used for transporting nuclear waste in Germany. There were quite a few protests against shipping nuclear waste through the country.<p>Wouldn't have been my choice for a software project :-)
The various CERN web pages such as this were a treasure trove of information when I was working on my last novel. I actually included a few paragraphs on Castor thinking of using it as a side-plot, but my editor cut the plot out along with a few other technical niceties. Sigh!
Wonder how this compares to Venti[1]. It looks a lot more complicated (not really a good thing).<p>[1]: <a href="https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/venti/" rel="nofollow">https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/venti/</a>
They now have over an exabyte worth of data on tapes.
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