Speaker
Dr
Horst Goeringer
(GSI)
Description
GSI in Darmstadt (Germany) is a center for heavy ion research
and hosts an Alice Tier2 center.
For the future FAIR experiments at GSI,
CBM and Panda, the planned data rates
will reach those of the current LHC experiments at Cern.
Since more than ten years gStore, the GSI Mass Storage System,
is successfully in operation.
It is a hierarchical storage system with a unique name space.
Its core consists of several tape libraries from different vendors
and currently ~20 data mover nodes connected within a SAN network.
The gStore clients transfer data via fast socket connections
from/to the disk cache of the data movers (~40TB currently).
Each tape is accessible from any data mover,
fully transparent to the users.
The tapes and libraries are managed by commercial software
(IBM Tivoli Storage Manager TSM), whereas the disk cache management
and the TSM and user interfaces are provided by GSI software.
For Alice users all gStore data are worldwide accessible
via Alice grid software,
and in a test environment the Alice Tier2 xrootd system
has been integrated successfully with gStore.
For 2007 it is planned to provide ~200TB via xrootd
backed with gStore.
Our experiences show that it's possible
to develop, maintain and operate successfully a large scale
mass storage system with mainly 2 FTEs.
As gStore is completely hardware independent and
fully scalable in data capacity and I/O bandwidth,
we are optimistic to fulfill also the dramatically increased
mass storage requirements of the FAIR experiments in 2014,
which will be several orders of magnitude higher than today.
Primary author
Dr
Horst Goeringer
(GSI)
Co-authors
Mr
Matthias Feyerabend
(GSI)
Dr
Sergei Sedykh
(GSI)
