Speaker
Description
As part of the CERN Storage Group’s technology investigations, we are exploring future-proof, scalable interactive service architectures that meet demanding requirements for performance and maintainability.
To achieve this, we are focusing on storage solutions that provide Linux-native filesystem access using open, standards-compliant technologies capable of securely supporting tens of thousands of clients.
One possible new design combines NFS 4.1 with a CephFS backend, offering a flexible and robust storage solution that meets the diverse requirements of modern HEP computing environments. The service architecture is based on four fundamental concepts:
Scalability & Resilience: A fully scalable architecture that leverages kernel nfsd and CephFS to ensure high throughput, redundancy, and fault tolerance.
Security & Compliance: End-to-end protection through Kerberos (krb5/krb5p), encryption, and certificate-based authentication to meet CERN’s community security standards.
Automation & Efficiency: Puppet-based provisioning and configuration management, integration of high availability and automated backup mechanisms for continuous service operation.
Interoperability: Complete solutions for both Linux and macOS clients, to ensure seamless access across heterogeneous computing environments.
This initiative seeks to identify a storage platform that provides transparent failover and strong support for both current and future metadata-intensive filesystem-based workflows, including batch processing, interactive analysis, and containerized (Kubernetes) workloads.
The outcome of this technology investigation will be a critical step toward building a secure, maintainable, and scalable filesystem ecosystem that supports the next generation of data-intensive HEP computing applications for Run-4 and beyond.