9–13 Jul 2018
Sofia, Bulgaria
Europe/Sofia timezone

Providing large-scale disk storage at CERN

10 Jul 2018, 14:45
15m
Hall 8 (National Palace of Culture)

Hall 8

National Palace of Culture

presentation Track 4 - Data Handling T4 - Data handling

Speaker

Herve Rousseau (CERN)

Description

The CERN IT Storage group operates multiple distributed storage systems and is
responsible
for the support of the infrastructure to accommodate all CERN storage
requirements, from the
physics data generated by LHC and non-LHC experiments to the personnel users’
files.

EOS is now the key component of the CERN Storage strategy. It allows to
operate at high incoming
throughput for experiment data-taking while running concurrent complex
production work-loads.
This high-performance distributed storage provides now more than 250PB of raw
disks and it is the
key component behind the success of CERNBox, the CERN cloud synchronisation
service which allows
syncing and sharing files on all major mobile and desktop platforms to provide
offline
availability to any data stored in the EOS infrastructure.

CERNBox recorded an exponential growth in the last couple of year in terms of
files and data stored
thanks to its increasing popularity inside CERN users community and thanks to
its integration
with a multitude of other CERN services (Batch, SWAN, Microsoft Office).

In parallel CASTOR is being simplified and transitioning from an HSM into an
archival system, focusing mainly
in the long-term data recording of the primary data from the detectors,
preparing the road to the next-generation
tape archival system, CTA.

The storage services at CERN cover as well the needs of the rest of our
community: Ceph as data back-end for
the CERN OpenStack infrastructure, NFS services and S3 functionality; AFS for
legacy home directory filesystem
services and its ongoing phase-out and CVMFS for software distribution.

In this paper we will summarise our experience in supporting all our
distributed storage system and the ongoing work
in evolving our infrastructure, testing very-dense storage building block
(nodes with more than 1PB of raw space)
for the challenges waiting ahead.

Primary authors

Presentation materials