TF-Storage Activity Areas
TF-Storage is active in the following Work Items:
A) Forum for storage and cloud:
Organize interesting talks with speakers both
from within and outside the TF-Storage participants to disseminate storage and
cloud knowledge and expertise.
Coordinated by Jan Meijer, UNINETT
B) Overview of (national) activities and deployments:
Gather information on
relevant projects, activities and deployments and publish on the TF-Storage wiki
on an ongoing basis, providing a technology watch function.
Led by Brian Boyle, HEAnet
C) File sharing services:
Coordinate the development and deployment of the (web
based) file sharing software such as FileSender, the Swiss DocExchange and
NorduShare.
Coordinated by Jan Meijer, UNINETT
D) Measuring storage performance:
Maintain the storage performance
measurement cookbook and investigate a cookbook for doing solid
measurements on storage performance.
Led by Maciej Brzezniak, PSNC
E) Storage and AAI:
Liaise with the TF-EMC2 on the ongoing work to use NREN
AAI federations with storage services. The TF-Storage will not work on solving
the problem but will assist the TF-EMC2 in its efforts.
Leif Johansson (SUNET) offered to liaise with various AAI communities
TF-Storage activity areas during the first term (2008-2010)
A) Knowledge dissemination:
Interesting talks are being organised inviting vendors and other commercial companies.
B) Overview of (national) activities and deployments:
The up-to-date overview on the national storage deployments and other activities can be found on the Storage Wiki.
C) Poste Restante service:
The participants are interested in a pan-European Poste Restante (i.e., Large File Transfer) service
development. The current directions are either towards University of Basel to investigate
the possibility to open the existing software code for use by the community (activity is coordinated by SWITCH)
or the TF-Storage participants to establish a separated Flash-based open source software development project (activity is coordinated by UNINETT).
D) Collection of best practices and service requirements:
PSNC is working on a cookbook for benchmarking storage performance.
UNINETT and Rutherford Appleton Lab. are also interested in that work. The basic strategy is to define
some simple use cases (e.g., LHC, Media storage, TV archive, etc.) and try to answer the main questions
using those experiences. It could be useful to identify organizations (outside of TF-Storage) and invite
them to talk about their benchmarking approaches.
E) Taxonomy of storage (virtualization) middleware:
The basic idea is to provide information about dCache, iRODS, etc. to NREN community.
Make a list on "who does what and who uses it" in this area and identify the common features of systems, tools, solutions, etc.
F) Taxonomy of storage technologies:
The aim is to exchange experiences on evaluation of storage technologies. It was noted that the storage technology is rapidly evolving. Such storage taxonomy is only useful if it is up-to-date.
G) Measuring storage performance:
Storage performance measurement know-how would be useful for defining acceptance tests with tender evaluations.
H) Backup and/or disaster recovery services:
It is progressing at national level. E.g., UNINETT has presented an initiative to provide backup service for the Norwegian University Colleges.
I) Storage and AAI:
Clear scenario is needed to solve the non-Web AAI issues. It is a hot topic extensively discussed and developed by the broader NREN community.
J) Energy consumption considerations:
TF-Storage group decided to drop this item on the 3rd TF-Storage meeting.
K) Liaise with other communities:
On-going activity.