Conveners
CTA: Morning Session 1
- Jaroslav Guenther (CERN)
CTA: Morning Session 2
- Joao Afonso (CERN)
CTA: Afternoon Session 1
- Michael Davis (CERN)
CTA: Afternoon Session 2
- Pablo Oliver Cortes
Description
CERN Tape Archive
Welcome to the second annual CTA Day at the EOS Workshop!
In mid-2022, the LHC awoke from its second Long Shutdown and restarted physics operations. Run-3 data-taking rates are several times higher than during Run-2; already CTA hit a new record of 26 PB archived in one month in November 2022.
This presentation will introduce the CTA Project, Team and Community, as well as an overview of...
Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) have been widely used in data storage environments. mhVTL design goals are unique in it is not attempting to be a better tape library, simply emulate real hardware—for those situations where it is impractical to carry a physical tape library with you.
Since 2021, AARNet have been using restic backup software in conjunction with CTA to backup user data in production EOS clusters. The road to production has not been without its challenges, requiring us to modify restic and create a custom backup scheduler and client workflows. This presentation will aim to cover the architecture, with a focus on restic: the basics, the customisations and...
Antares is the new tape archive service at RAL Tier-1 that went into production on 4th of March 2022. The service is built around the EOS/CTA technologies developed at CERN. EOS is the user facing service that manages the incoming namespace requests and a thin SSD buffer, and CTA is deployed as the tape back-end system. In this talk, we describe the setup of ANTARES and discuss the service’s...
We will share our experiences on EOS CTA and talk about our plan for the future of CTA. All experiments of IHEP have adopted CTA as the main tape storage management system, and preparing a new tape library for TIER1 of LHCb. We've test the tape restful API with X509 and token auth to access EOS & CTA via HTTP as well as XRootD. In the future, we shall upgrade our production instances to EOS &...
Fermilab has decided to replace Enstore, its locally developed tape management system, with CTA. Fermilab runs two Enstore instances: CMS with a small, dedicated tape buffer and Public operating like an HSM with tight integration between dCache and Enstore
This talk will cover:
- Metadata migration from Enstore to CTA
- Results of dCache integration with CTA at FNAL
- Performance...
Since early 2021 CTA has been on a test bed at DESY. Having observed no flies in the ointment and seamless integration with dCache in-place, CTA advances to production in 2023. This presentation will give an overview of the current migration and deployment status as well as future plans at DESY.
At PIC, we currently have Enstore as our tape storage system, but due to the discontinuation of its support and development in the near future, we want to share our experiences and insights about the testing and implementation of Cern Tape Archive (CTA) as a potential replacement.
We have set up a CTA test instance integrated with dCache in order to evaluate its functionalities and work on...
At RAL, we intend to consolidate the two CASTOR instances into a single CTA instance with multiple EOS disk buffers, similar to the CERN architecture. The 'WLCGTape' Castor instance has been fully migrated to CTA at RAL, and has been running in production for LHC run 3 data taking.
In preparation for the migration of the 'Facilities' CASTOR instance at RAL onto our CTA instance, there have...
An EOSCTA instance is an EOS instance - commonly called a tape buffer - configured with a CERN Tape Archive (CTA) back-end.
This EOS instance is entirely bandwidth oriented: it offers an SSD based tape interconnection, it can contain spinning disks if needed and it is optimized for the various tape workflows.
This talk will present how to enable EOS for tape using CTA and the Swiss horology...
The CERN Tape Archive (CTA) is a vital system for storing and retrieving data at CERN. However, the reliability of the CTA system can be impacted by various factors, including hardware failures, software bugs, and network connectivity issues. To ensure the continued availability of the stored data, it is critical to have robust mechanisms in place for handling failed requests.
This talk...
Reliable and effective monitoring is essential for smooth operations and for tailoring an EOSCTA deployment to users’ needs. Short-term monitoring provides alerting for abnormal system states, and long-term monitoring allows us to track system usage and performance over time.
In this presentation we walk you through the general setup we use for Tier-0 storage at CERN, which allows us to...
A ‘Repack’ is the process of moving or copying data from one tape cartridge to one or multiple others. Such a process may be needed for various reasons, such as transferring data to more compact media, creating additional copies, and recovering data from faulty media. At CERN the CTA software manages the data transfer itself, but more steps are needed in order to complete the full repack...
This hands-on session will focus on installing and configuring a standalone CTA CI runner:
- single host kubernetes cluster in Alma9
- 1 Virtual tape library with CTA CI requirements
At the end of this sessions the participants should be able to run CTA Continuous Integration test on their box.
When updating the disk file meta data for tape files, it is necessary to do the updates in both EOS and CTA. Examples of use-cases that require these updates are migration to CTA, moving a file from one EOS instance to another, switching from single to dual copy and restoring deleted files.
The tools for handling these use-cases are not atomic, but they are idempotent and consistency is...
As the amount of stored data, scope and operation complexity of CTA grew, it became necessary to improve the level of control over each tape lifecycle and to provide mechanisms that allow for an improved automation of CTA operations, such as repacking.
In this presentation we will talk about the new CTA tape states, which expand the behaviour of the disabled state. This includes support for...
At the EOS Workshop 2022 BoF, it was decided that CTA should add support for reading OSM/dCache and Enstore tape formats. To make this feature work seamlessly within CTA, we refactored our codebase to accommodate different tape file readers.
In this presentation, we will discuss the design and implementation of external tape format readers into CTA. We will also cover the unit and...
CTA software development is primarily driven by the needs of the CERN experimental programme. Looking beyond Run-3, data rates are set to continue to rise exponentially into Run-4 and beyond. The CTA team are planning how to scale the software and service to meet these new challenges.
CTA is also driven by the needs of the community outside CERN. The landscape of tape archival for...
Final comments, questions and discussion. Segue into the apéro in R2 where we can continue talking.
