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AARNet News - Orange
09 March, 2016

Collaborating with CERN to improve file storage and sharing for researchers

AARNet engineers collaborate with their peers around the globe on open development projects for the benefit the research and education community.

Research CloudStor Data Transfer Tools News

We posted a story about our work on the OpenCloudMesh (OCM) project last month, but this isn’t the only open development project we’ve been involved in.

AARNet engineers have also been collaborating with colleagues at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and ownCloud to develop new storage APIs to fit for truly large fast storage infrastructures for ownCloud 9, which will provide scientists with scalable access and sharing abilities for multi-petabytes of data on a global basis.

These new capabilities will be integrated into AARNet’s CloudStor large file sharing and storage service.

You can read more about this project on the opensource.com blog

We’ve also been working with CERN to advance global filesystem technology.

We’ve been experimenting with a secure storage environment that presents a federated highly consistent traditional filesystem enabling fast, user proximal and atomic consistency of data between Budapest (Hungary), Geneva (Switzerland), Taipei (Taiwan) and Sydney (Australia). This allows user-permitted heuristic configuration of data presence at a global level.

“The aim is to improve productivity for researchers travelling from Australia to Europe or vice versa by enabling their data to follow them safely and therefore providing extremely fast access, as if it was always local,” says AARNet Solutions Architect David Jericho.

The plan is to extend this storage environment to include the United States and Asia.

The advantage of providing a traditional filesystem model is that data ingest and egress can be performed by traditional transfer tools, furthering the concept of CloudStor getting out of the way of researcher’s workflows, while enabling them to perform high speed data transfer using the AARNet network.

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