During three years in production at CERN as the WLCG Tier-0 tape storage service, the CTA software has evolved and gained various features driven by the service requirements. Discussions between developers and the operations have led to design choices that shaped the service and helped refine CTA operations best practices.
This presentations aims at clarifying the current operations and...
Recent years have witnessed an increase in the number and sophistication of cyberattacks on academic sites. One way to improve resilience is to store backups in a completely separate administrative domain to the data being protected. This Birds-of-a-Feather session is for site administrators who would like to discuss the possibility of backing up to each others sites.
The goal of this hands-on session is to be able to debug common problems that could be faced by CTA administrators or operators. We will briefly give a broad overview of all the logging generated by the different CTA services, along with a peek into our monitoring dashboards. This gives a starting point to be able to understand and debug problems that may appear while operating CTA.
After...
Deletions are a rare event in tape archive storage operations. When they happen, they are often the result of a user mistake or a bug. As deletion is asynchronous on the tape side, nothing is physically deleted until the tape is reclaimed. CTA keeps a copy of all the deleted file metadata so that files deleted unintentionally can be restored. This hands-on session will allow participants to...
This presentation will aim to provide a yearly site report. This year at AARNet, we implemented tape limiting and offsite tape vaulting processes and workflows. CTA was also an integral part of decommissioning efforts of some of our storage platforms.
In 2024, Fermilab will replace the legacy Enstore tape management system with CTA for CMS data. This will be followed by the migration of the second instance of Enstore containing all other scientific data on tape at Fermilab.
We will detail the results of on-going scale tests of CTA. These tests target the 10% scale in tape bandwidth compared to the existing CMS Enstore instance. Tests...
Throughout 2023, we have continued conducting operational tests to familiarize ourselves with the functionality of CTA and understand the differences from Enstore. In addition to configuration tests of the application to observe how resource allocation works or to configure automatic tape provisioning, efforts have been made to deploy a centralized logging system to enhance the monitoring and...
This
presentation summarizes the current state of tape storage systems at
the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) and gives our current
vision of its future in response to the discontinuation of Enstore
support. We provide a brief description of two of our currently
operating tape systems: a 90 PB instance built on dCache/Enstore and
an 11 PB instance based by EOS/CTA....
This paper presents one of the possible architectures for a container-based CTA installation designed for a midsize storage system. The primary objective of this setup is to store archive data efficiently and integrate it with an existing computing cluster.
The configuration of the CTA tape daemon was inherited from CASTOR, which relied on a manual process to create and store the configuration for each tape drive. As the scale of CERN's tape operations have grown to hundreds of drives, this approach has not scaled well. The CTA team have therefore developed a new semi-automated process to determine the configuration of each drive. The...
Due to the upcoming end-of-life of CERN CentOS 7, CTA will be migrated to Alma Linux 9, following the recommendations of the CERN Linux team. Migrating the CTA codebase from CC7 to Alma 9 presented a range of compatibility hurdles. This talk will delve into the challenges encountered and the strategies used to overcome them, including: managing version changes in vital dependencies like...
