This document discusses using iRODS and object storage for academic research repositories. It describes common challenges with long-term data archiving and collaboration. iRODS provides metadata tagging and rules engines to automate workflows and long-term storage on object storage like DDN's WOS for exabyte scalability, security and ease of administration. A case study is presented on using these technologies together for HPC research computing.

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1!
Academic Workflow for
Research Repositories
Using iRODS and Object
Storage
2016 iRODS User’s Group Meeting
9 June 2016 Randall Splinter, Ph.D.
HPC Research Computing Solutions Architect
RSplinter@ddn.com
770.633.2994

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2! Agenda
▶ Introduction to the Problem
• HPC Workflows
• The Problem of Long Term Archiving
▶ Object Store to the Rescue
▶ How iRODS Enables Object Storage
▶ Why iRODS with DDN WOS is a Superior
Solution for Research Repositories
▶ A Case Study

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3!
Introduction to the Problem
▶ The Problem of Collaboration
• NAS technologies (NFS, CIFS) are local
o They don’t tend to scale well over WAN distances
– But collaborators are frequently widely separated in
distance
o How to enable researchers to share data without
administrative overhead – securely
– Typically, only system administrators can control the
ACLs on NFS/CIFS mounts
• FTP
o Security
• Tape
o Yech

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4!
HPC Workflows
▶ Ingest data from a source (Analysis of data)
• Pre-analysis on low-end storage
• Move cleaned up data to a PFS and compute
• After full analysis data is moved to long term storage
o Can this be automated? – Yes, with iRODS.
▶ No ingest (Pure simulation)
• Compute models are run on a compute cluster with PFS
• After full analysis data is moved to long term storage
o Again automation is key.
▶ Data sets are exploding!

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5!
The Problem of Long Term Archiving
▶ Data must be secure
• From deletion (accident or deliberate)
• Loss from theft
o Security hacks
o Faculty or students leave and take IP with them
▶ Must satisfy regulatory restrictions
• HIPAA, for instance
▶ Changing hardware standards
• In particular tape standards
▶ Hardware availability
• Spinning media is mechanical and will not last forever

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6!
Object Store to the Rescue
▶ All Object stores provide a way to replicate data over
large distances
• Some more effectively than others
o Provides a way to effectively share data over WAN scales
• Most object stores were designed for cloud storage
o Security has always been important
o Ease of data sharing has been important
▶ This now enables more effective data sharing and data
security than with traditional storage solutions at price
points that traditional NAS systems cannot approach.

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7!
How iRODS Enables Object Storage
▶ iRODS is a very effective middleware layer for
accessing multiple storage resources
▶ iRODS handles the security and database
management of the ingested data
▶ Provides a powerful metadata search capability
for ingested data
▶ Provides a rules engine for the processing of
incoming data and the manipulation of data on
the back-end
• For instance,
o Data can be moved to slower storage resources as they age or
another criteria is met (Essentially HSM)
o Data can be secured from removal, editing or modification based
upon criteria using the “null” chmod – Retention policies!
o Anything else?

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8!
DDN WOS: Key Features
Fully-Integrated Object
Storage Appliance
WOS7000, 60 Drives in 4U,
with 1 or 2 object storage
servers per appliance
Federated, Global Namespace
Locally or across multiple geographies
with smart policies for performance and/or
disaster recovery on a per-object basis
Pure Object Storage
Formats drives with custom WOS disk file
system, no Linux file I/Os, no fragmentation,
fully contiguous object read and write
operations for maximum disk efficiency
Latency-Aware Access Manager
WOS intelligently makes decisions on
the best geographies to get from based
upon location access load and latency
User Defined Metadata and
Metadata Search
Applications can assign their own metadata via
object storage API, WOS now also supports
parallel search of WOS user metadata
Self-healing Architecture
No hard tie between physical disks and data.
Failed drives are recovered through dispersed
data placement – rebuilds happen at read, not
write, speed – rebuilding only data.
Flexible Data Protection
Select multiple policy-driven data protection
schemes to meet application, workflow and
disaster recovery requirements
Exabyte Scalability
Create virtually limitless data repositories, non-disruptively
seamlessly scale to over an exabyte of capacity

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9!
Why iRODS with DDN WOS is a Superior
Solution for Repositories
▶ Ease of Scalability with WOS
▶ Ease of administration – Once rules are tested and in
place the system can be managed with a minimum of
administrative overhead
▶ Automating workflows to guarantee consistency and
reproducibility in the science that is produced

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10!
Why iRODS with DDN WOS is a Superior
Solution for Repositories
▶ Ease of auditing for both usage and back charging and
for maintaining adequate data security compliance
▶ DDN WOS makes remote replication simple and
provides a straightforward way to manage DR systems

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11!
Why iRODS with WOS is a Superior
Solution for Repositories
▶ Central to any repository is the ability to add metadata
tags and search metadata.
• iRODS has extensive abilities to do that – Significantly
better than any competing options
# imeta add –d filename “Date” “2 Feb 2016”
# imeta ls –d filename
AVUs defined for dataObj filename:
attribute: Meta1
value: hello
units:
---
attribute: Date
value: 2 Feb 2016
units:
# imeta rm –d filename “Meta1” “hello”

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12!
A Case Study
Hrothgar
Compute
Cluster
Lustre
Filesystem

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13!
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