dCache, the agile storage technology

by Prof. Patrick Fuhrmann (Deutsches Elektronensynchrotron DESY Gruppe IT)

Friday 27 Sept 2013, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Rome

Rostagni meeting room (INFN-LNL)

For over ten years, dCache. org is providing reliable storage software to HEP, as well as to an increasing number of new communities. At the same time, the dCache collaboration is eager to assimilate the latest mechanism in the area of storage and data access into the dCache technology. In the past, this has been the integration of the SRM protocol, as requested by WLCG, and WebDAV to enable standard WEB access to data. Most recently the work on NFS4.1/pNFS has been finished, allowing young communities direct access to their data by means of a mounted file system. But as technology moves on, dCache is now working on new interesting fields. To integrate into the cloud world, dCache is working on implementing CDMI, the ISO standard protocol for manageing cloud storage and, in collaboration with the German "Large Scale Data Management and Analysis" project,  dCache is investigating in authenticating users through remote, possibly federated, identity management systems. Furthermore, dCache is going to provide multi-tier storage to optimize the use of the different storage technologies, from tape to solid state disks. As dCache traditionally supports the migration of data from and to tape systems, the team recently started to work on taking the burden of small files from the backend tape systems and internally optimizes that use case for tertiary storage. Beside a brief review of the achieved goals of the dCache collaboration, this presentation will mainly focus on work in progress as described above.