The National Library of China

Largest Library in Asia Chooses Sun Storage Solution for its Digital Library

The National Library of China, (NLC) is the largest library in Asia and the fifth largest in the world. The library houses 270,000 rare records and 1,640,000 ancient records. As the national center for the interlibrary loan system, the NLC has established ties with 558 libraries in China, dealing with an average 30,000 requests annually. It has also formed partnerships with 557 libraries in 117 countries and regions for exchanges of publications. The National Library of China is open to the public 365 days a year, serving an average of 15,000 visitors per day.

Customer Challenges

Store, backup, archive and restore its digital library data
Provide data in an standard format to ensure future availability

Solution

The National Library of China was previously archiving its data onto CD and tape media. Needing to provide ongoing digital storage of its collections in an standard format, the library deployed the Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library system for its archival, backup and restore needs, and a Sun Fire T2000 server running on the Solaris 10 Operating System.

Business Results

Highly reliable storage system
Immediate access to data for users 24/7

Products and Services

Story Details

The National Library of China (NLC), in Beijing, serves as the repository of the nation's publications, a national bibliographic center, as well a national center for the preservation and conservation for ancient books. NLC has over six million Chinese books, and close to four million foreign books, as well as a significant rare book collection, and an expanding electronic resources of books, periodicals, and databases. NLC is open every day of the year, and attracts 15,000 daily visitors.

By the end of 2006 the library had 25,704,360 volumes of material, all of which needed to be archived to ensure it is available and accessible for future generations. The Document Digital Center of the China National Library (CNL) was first established in March 1999 to digitize material into CD-Rom storage. NLC has been steadily digitizing books, paintings, calligraphy, and ancient and rare collections for archival and ease of access, as part of its ongoing Digital Library Project (DLP). The 80,000 square meter Digital Library of China opened in 2008.

DLP is designed to preserve in digital form manuscripts and books representing China's history and cultural heritage and to capture and preserve present day Chinese culture such as Web pages, blogs and information that occurs only in electronic format.

As of 2006 only 20 percent of the NLC's material was available to the public in digital form, and NLC was faced with many challenges to increasing that number, including budget and resource constraints. Initially the library was digitizing and storing data on an HP and LSI disk array in a storage area network (SAN) environment. Selected material was archived and backed up on disk and tape media. This storage solution presented problems due to limited capacity.

The digital storage project started in 2006 and included a feasibility study. NLC analyzed the long term total cost of ownership and the nature of the heterogeneous environment to ensure that the data in tape format could be accessed in the future on new technology.

NLC needed to store its library contents in a secure, reliable storage platform and in an standard format that would ensure continued access, regardless of technology. NLC chose the Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library system due to Sun's reputation, the SL8500 library's high availability, and its ability to scale to accommodate future storage demands. “Sun is a notable company for tape library solutions,” comments the Deputy Leader of Data Storage Group at the National Library of China.

NLC selected the Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library with 16 LTO4 4GB FC tape drives and 1000 slots as part of its three-tier storage solution. NLC partnered with MDCL on the storage project. MDCL was responsible for deploying Sun hardware and software, as well as storage consolidation and data migration.

The SL8500 library is providing a consolidated mass storage system for the archival, backup and restore needs of the library, while providing high performance and reliability. With this system in place, NLC will be able to reduce risk of data loss and ensure access for all users both now and in the future.

NLC also deployed Sun StorageTek Automated Cartridge System Library Software (ACSLS) Manager software and a Sun Fire T2000 server as the ACSLS server. ACSLS management software enables the tape library solution to be shared in NLC's heterogeneous environment, which includes Solaris 10 Operating System, IBM AIX, HP-UX, UNIX and Windows platforms. StorageTek ACSLS Manager software functions as the central service provider for all library operations, efficiently sharing library resources with any ACSLS-enabled application on any system, and allowing NLC to manage multiple libraries from a single point of control.

NLC is using SunSpectrum Gold Support to provide 24/7 support for the SL8500 tape library solution. With data needing to be available to users 24/7, 365 days of the year, this level of support was deemed critical to the library.

NLC's three-tier storage infrastructure, running a fibre channel (FC) disk array, Serial ATA (SATA) disk array, and tape storage, will need data archiving software. The library is currently undergoing a Proof of Concept (POC) on Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager and QFS software. NLC needs to ensure large volumes of data can be moved automatically between multiple tiered storage while users can transparently and rapidly access and share multiple copies of the same data.