EUROSTORE Project

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A High Performance Storage Project

The massive explosion in data volumes represents one of the neglected areas of computing and currently one providing severe restrictions for computational growth. Ever-increasing computational performance; easier and higher bandwith access to data from the Internet; sophisticated increases in algorithms; addressing the issues regarding legacy storage systems, etc, are all contributory factors leading to the requirement to provide the capability to offer data repositories with high performance, high availability based on components driven by competitive markets. With this capability, organizations will be able to plan computational capacities in line with their business growth.

The project will develop a high performance mass storage system, combining the performance of a Parallel Filesystem (PFS) and the functionality of a Hierarchial mass Storage Management system (HSM). The resulting system will be an open architecture, globally accessible from any network supporting standard protocols. The Partners start on the basis of the availabilty of the PFS currently available for CS-type systems, and owned by QSW. Such PFS shall be extended in functionality and shall be integrated with the HSM, to be developed by the DESY team. The HSM part of the EUROSTORE project is a network centered software package providing hierachial storage management services to its clients. The Enhanced PFS will be the main client to the HSM. The prototype of the system will be installed at CERN. Here it will be evaluted and compared with the leading commercially available system (HPSS). The other end-users of the project (AMC, HNMS & Tera) will assess the suitabiltity of the system for their commercial needs.

The project is motivated by strong user demand and the lack of satisfactory commercial solutions. The few existing HSM and parallel file system products do not fully address all the needs of the user community, and in some cases represent a major investment that users are not willing to undertake.

The project will enable the partners to build high performance storage systems from low cost components. It will lay the foundation for commercial products with braod market appeal.

The project is part of the ESPRIT IV (European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology) programme of the European Commission. It was launched 1.3.1998 under the ESPRIT project number 26317.

For comments and changes send e-mail to Ingo Augustin