21 February 2014

TF-Storage meeting

A quick summary of the Terena TF-Storage meeting earlier this month. Having been on the mailing list for ages, it was good to attend in person - and to catch up with friends from SWITCH and Cybera.

Now there was a lot of talk about cloudy storage, particularly OpenStack's SWIFT and CINDER, as, respectively, object and block stores. At some point when I have a spare moment (haha) I will see if I can get them running in the cloud. I asked about CDMI support for SWIFT but it has not been touched in a while - it'd be a good thing to have, though (so we can use it with other stuff). Also software defined networking (SDN) got attention; it has been talked about for a while but seems to be maturing. Their product used to be called Quantum and is now called Neutron (thanks to Joe from Cybera for the link) There was talk about OpenStack and CEPH, with work by Maciej Brzeźniak from PSNC being presented.

There's an interesting difference between people doing very clever things with their erasure codes and secrecy schemes, and the rest of us who tend to just replicate, replicate, replicate. If you look at the WLCG stuff, we tend to not do clever things - the middleware stack is already complicated enough - but just create enough replicas, and control the process fairly rigidly.

There was a discussion about identity management, of course, which mostly reiterated stuff we did for the grid about ten years ago - which led to VOMS and suchlike.

The report triggered a discussion as to whether the grid is a distributed object store.  It kind of is. 

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