Consortium provides PRINCE databank for Queensland (July 1996)

New databank for State of Queensland (Australia).

The race for data banking continues with the recent announcement of a new site in Australia. PECC, HP and Storage Technology Corp (STK). are in the process of implementing a data bank for the State of Queensland. The facility called the Pacific Resource Information Center (PRINCE) is being installed at the Queensland Supercomputing Laboratories (QSL). Some 70,000 nine-track tapes, written reports, exploration surveys and rolls of maps will be transcribed onto STK’s high density media.

Initial data volumes are estimated at 28TB. "Our goal with PRINCE is to protect the state’s data asset and to make that asset available and easily accessible to explorers," said Peter Harvey, business development manager at QSL. "This is a comprehensive project in that we first have to collect all the data, archive it and then make it accessible. We view combining HP’s high performance scalable servers with automated tape libraries from Storage Technology and the sophisticated map-based browser software from PECC as giving us the best opportunity to quickly bring the system on line." HP served as the system integrator on the PRINCE project.