Speaker
Dr
Surya Pathak
(Vanderbilt University)
Description
Storing and accessing large volumes of data across geographically separated locations
or cutting across labs and universities in a transparent, reliable fashion is a
difficult problem. There is urgency to this problem with the commissioning of the LHC
around the corner (2007). The primary difficulties that need to be over come in order
to address this problem are policy driven secure access, mirroring and striping of
data for reliable storage, scalability, and interoperability between diverse storage
elements. This paper presents a flexible storage framework called L-Store (logistical
storage) to address these issues. L-Store is conceptually designed using software
agent technology and the Internet Backplane Protocol. The software agents provide
scalability as the L-Store components can be distributed over multiple machines.
L-Store provides rich functionalities in the form of certificate based
authentication, mirroring and striping of data (fault tolerance), policy based data
management, and transparent peer-to-peer interoperability of backend storage media.
Keeping in mind the scenario where different Tiers and virtual organizations can have
different types of storage elements (SE), L-Store is designed to have a common
storage resource manager (SRM) compliant interface such that any SRM compliant SE can
share data with an L-Store system. L-Store is agnostic to the underlying hardware and
can be installed on simple personal computers having a disk cache to a full fledged
hierarchical storage system (with tapes and disk backups).
Author
Dr
Surya Pathak
(Vanderbilt University)
Co-authors
Dr
Alan Tacket
(Vanderbilt University)
Mr
Kevin McCord
(Vanderbilt University)
Dr
Paul Sheldon
(Vanderbilt University)
