UK Grid Engineering Taskforce (ETF): Report on Lightweight SRM Evaluation

The Lightweight SRM Evaluation is a project operated by the UK Grid Engineering Taskforce (ETF). Its purpose is to evaluate a lightweight Storage Resource Manager (SRM) implementation, namely the Disk Pool Manager (DPM) software developed by CERN, for suitability for production deployments on the UK National Grid Service infrastructure. DPM is lightweight in that it implements SRM protocol services to stand in front of pools of diskbased file systems rather than more “heavyweight” Mass Storage Systems (MSS) which might include tape archive systems as well as disk pools. It is also lightweight in that it is supposed to be low maintenance, and easy to run in a good performance mode. This evaluation finds that deployment of the software in the NGS environment should be straightforward, and recommends that the NGS should avail itself of the expertise that exists within the GridPP Storage group in planning, executing and supporting the rollout of SRM within NGS. The NGS DPM services could be “plugged into” the GridPP Storage group testing infrastructure and publish themselves to appropriate Index Information servers: storage accounting work has been done and should be adopted by NGS. The only successful deployments of DPM were via RPMs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Scientific Linux installations. The best approach for NGS sites might be to provision additional servers on which to deploy DPM services to stand in front of disk resources to be managed as pools. UK e-Science Technical Report Series Report UKeS-2007-03 Available from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2007-03.pdf Copyright © 2007 The University of Edinburgh. All rights reserved. UK Grid Engineering Taskforce (ETF): Report on Lightweight SRM Evaluation David McBride, Steven Young, Tim Parkinson, David Wallom Version Date Comments 0.1 2006-08-17 Initial Draft 0.2 2007-02-21 Second Draft 0.3 2007-05-02 Minor corrections following comments 0.4 2007-05-03 Final revisions