Collaboration on Storage Services: 2nd Meeting

14 December 2007
Hilton Hotel, Schiphol, Amsterdam, Netherlands


This meeting continued the discussion about opportunities and areas for collaboration on data storage services which started on the 29th of June 2007 (see sidebar).

Participants at the previous meeting and via the mailing list showed interest in collaborating in the area of data storage services. Where the previous meeting focused on identifying data storage activities in European Grids and NRENs, this meeting focused on formulating activities in which the participants wish to collaborate.

The meeting also discussed the desirable form (e.g., workshops, TERENA Task Force, etc.) for future collaboration on data storage services.

Items up for discussion are listed below. This was a non-limiting list. During the meeting these items were prioritised according to participants' interest.

  1. Set up a pan-European file exchange service modelled on the Finnish poste restante service (see the presentation "Exchanging files using centralised temporary storage with federated authentication" by Jari Miettinen (CSC) at the previous meeting);
  2. Authentication, Authorisation, Accounting for distributed storage infrastructures. How do we connect the European AAI federations to storage services? How do we ensure consistency in authentication and authorisation across HPC, grid, storage and web logon? Will it be possible to use existing AAI federations? What are the issues we need to resolve?
  3. Disaster recovery services and business continuity services: with the explosive growth of data storage needs, the advent of virtual computing and the complexity of disaster recovery, it seems to make sense to look closely at providing more centralised disaster recovery services, especially to the smaller institutions connected to NRENs;
  4. Distributed storage infrastructure middlewares: a variety of storage middlewares and distributed file system technologies are available or under development, SRB, iRODS, pNFS, Hadoop, LUSTRE, etc. These are designed to provide the cement to link disparate storage elements to one coherent infrastructure. Which middlewares look most promising? Which middlewares are good candidates to contribute to? Is the tight coupling useful at all?
  5. Comparing approaches to data resilience: how to store data efficiently and how to share data internationally;
  6. Assist local and metropolitan sites in their challenge to deliver large amounts of high speed storage to their users;
  7. Best practices, technology watch, product evaluations: sharing and/or writing cookbooks, How To's, BCPs etc. It might be interesting to create a coordinated tech-watch, where information gathered by the various people in this group working on storage is aggregated and made available to the various local (NREN) communities. Evaluations of equipment and/or software could also be undertaken in a coordinated way, removing the need for everyone to test everything;
  8. Gathering information on the TCO of different ways to implement storage, experiences, reasons for choosing a certain direction;
  9. Sharing public procurement procedures, tips, tricks and techniques
  10. Investigate legal and financial issues for offering storage services, also for providing these services to other NRENs;
  11. Exchanging ideas and information on storage and data management;
  12. Exchanging information on current and future plans related to data storage;
  13. Energy consumption. For many reasons - such as cutting power bills, the impossibility of getting more power to certain places, the need to run more equipment within the same power configuration, public and/or political pressure - we are likely to have to think about how we can bring down the power consumption of data storage solutions while keeping up with the growth of data.