Case Study: Met Office achieves 13x storage growth and faster, more accurate weather forecasts with Oracle's tape storage

Met Office Chooses Oracle’s Tape Storage for World-Leading Weather Supercomputer

Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, invested in the world’s largest weather and climate supercomputer to deliver more detailed forecasting and better warnings for the public, government, and businesses. That growth created a major storage challenge: the previous archive could not support the new system’s data volumes and availability needs, with expected data growth from about 60 PB to 800–1,200 PB and a requirement for continuous access to feed thousands of daily analyses and forecasts. A smooth migration was also essential to avoid disruption to critical forecasting services.

Met Office selected Oracle’s modular tape library system as its managed archive solution, providing the scalability, performance, and continuity required. The deployment increased storage capacity 13x and performance 2x, delivering sustained throughput exceeding 15 GB/s, archiving 100–200 TB per day, and provisioning up to 1,200 PB with replicated data halls for business continuity. Tape analytics enabled proactive maintenance, compression extended effective capacity, and the full implementation and migration were completed ahead of schedule with no disruption to operations.

Met Office

Bob Maynard

Storage Team Leader