I was part of the team that installed an HGST Active Archive system for EPFL's Metamedia project, built to preserve decades of recordings from the Montreux Jazz Festival. The system held a total of 13PB of disk-based storage.

The archive holds one of the world's most significant live music collections, and the brief was to give it a storage platform that could scale for the long term while staying resilient and accessible.

The deployment comprised three data racks split across two sites: two racks at EPFL in Lausanne and a third at the Montreux Jazz Festival site. The sites were connected over a 10GB fibre link running beneath Lake Geneva. The three-rack split was designed for redundancy, allowing the system to continue operating even if one rack was taken out of action.

Working on a project tied to a cultural archive of this scale was a highlight of my data centre career. It combined large-capacity storage engineering with a genuine sense that the work mattered beyond the technology itself.

Each Active Archive rack is shipped pre-built (all 1000Kg of it!) and pre-configured so that it can just be plugged in and switched on.

The challenge was that the EPFL and Montreux data centres had fixed racking already installed and no room for a standalone unit. As a consequence, each Active Archive rack had to be dismantled and the parts reassembled in the dedicated racking! This was a complex and time-consuming process, but it was all completed successfully.

A team of us completed the re-racking (2 units) at EPFL and then I completed the third at Montreux. All the racks started off together at EPFL so that the initial data set could be loaded and verified before the racks went their separate ways. Get-in at Montreux was manic because it was a few days before the Jazz Festival opening night and stage crews and instruments etc. were still arriving.

I completed the final commissioning of the system two days before the festival started, in time for it to accept a live digital feed directly from the Swiss Television on site video suite. Sadly I couldn’t stay for the festival itself.

Each disk caddy holds 14 x 6TB drives

Reracked system is good to go

Get-in was 'busy'

Cool stuff