Speaker
P. Fuhrmann
(DESY)
Description
The dCache software system has been designed to manage a
huge amount of individual disk storage nodes and let them
appear under a single file system root. Beside a variety
of other features, it supports the GridFtp dialect, implements
the Storage Resource Manager interface (SRM V1) and can be linked
against the CERN GFAL software layer. These abilities makes
dCache a perfect Storage Element in the context of LCG and
possibly future grid initiatives as well.
During the last year, dCache has been deployed at dozens of
Tier-I and Tier-II centers for the CMS and CDF experiments in
the US and Europe, including Fermilab, Brookhaven, San Diego,
Karlsruhe and CERN. The largest implementation, the CDF system
at FERMI, provides 150 TeraBytes of disk space and delivers up
to 50 TeraBytes/day to its clients.
Sites using the LCG dCache distribution are more or less
operating the cache as black box and little knowledge is
available about customization and enhanced features.
This presentation is therefor intended to make non dCache users
curious and enable dCache users to better integrate dCache into
their site specific environment. Beside many other topics,
paper will touch on the possibility of dCache to closely cooperate
with tertiary storage systems, like Enstore, Tsm and HPSS. It
will describe the way dCache can be configured to attach
different pool nodes to different user groups but let them all
use the same set of fall back pools. We will explain how dCache
takes care of dataset replication, either by configuration or by
automatic detection of data access hot spots. Finally we will
report on ongoing development plans.
Author
P. Fuhrmann
(DESY)
