The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) Data group has made major technical advances during the last three years, all of them conveyed in the last EMI 3 release, Monte Bianco. ‘We have been working on storage solutions that are at the same level with what industry provides and we are aiming to provide consistent access to EMI storage through already available industry standards,’ said Patrick Fuhrmann, the EMI Data Area and dCache group leader.
‘Our main objective is to make EMI storage fully standard compliant,’ he continued. ‘Following the vision of the European Commission to allow universities and laboratories to pick EMI open source solutions instead of possibly expensive commercial systems, by consistently using standards, EMI data systems can become a drop-in replacement, meaning that EMI storage can be applied without changing the remaining infrastructure.’
The specification of the most recent version of the successful Network File System protocol (NFS4.1/pNFS) has become available. The NFS4.1 protocol allows EMI storage solutions to be integrated into the users’ workspace as easy as attaching a USB stick to the computer. EMI/dCache has been the first storage system making NFS4.1/pNFS available in production. All storage systems within EMI, dCache, DPM and Storage Resource Manager (StoRM) support Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) access. WebDAV is an extension of http/https that facilitates reading and writing of documents on the web.
