[tsc] Draft 0.1 of the technical Strategy Document.

[Chris Kantarjiev]

I'm still trying to figure out what to say about application provisioning APIs, 
but in the mean time, allow me to interject that as well as File Movement, we 
need to say something about storage provisioning.

In fact, I'd argue that File Movement is a special case of a much more general 
data provisioning area of focus. It isn't always a case of moving the data as 
much as it might be an opportunity to connect the data on one particular storage 
device to the appropriate computing resources, while managing access rights and 
security. For example (quoting from the EGA doc, 
http://www.gridalliance.org/imwp/idms/popups/pop_download.asp?ContentID=7945):

...

• Find an appropriately sized storage container of the correct access type 
(Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI, NFS, CIFS), possibly using best-fit logic
• Secure the container so that only the requester can write to it and read from it
• Set up the needed switching between the requester and the storage
• Set up a VLAN or Fibre Channel mask to establish security and prevent accidents
• Engage any needed over-the-wire or at-rest cryptographic security mechanisms
• Hand the client back an address to use for the data container

Data provisioning typically requires at least three steps: initial population, 
keeping the data in sync, and cleaning up the data when it is no longer needed. 
If the container must be populated with an initial data set from somewhere, 
additional work is required. There may be an opportunity to use cloning 
technology to greatly enhance the efficiency of the copy operation.

After the initial provisioning step, the data may needed to be frequently 
snapshotted and/or replicated for Disaster Recovery (DR), RPO/RTO or other 
purposes. At the end of the job, results may need to be copied elsewhere to a 
location of the client's specification. In addition, all temporary copies of any 
data may need to be securely shredded when the user or application is done with 
the container and its offspring. Yet the user's desire is simple: a data 
container conforming to some service level that the system has previously 
advertised.
...

The GGF efforts in this area have, as far as I can tell, been focused on the 
assumption that the data is over there, and now I want it right here, and the 
only way to do that is to move it all. I think our strategy document needs to 
deal with a more complex data and storage world than that, although certainly 
not all at once. Resources have to be discovered, provisioned, managed, and 
offered with certain SLAs. OGF has partnerships with some standards orgs that 
have products in this space (SNIA SMI-S, DMTF CIM).

Of course, data provisioning decomposes into storage provisioning, which is a 
huge can of worms (EGA pretty much burned up everyone who tried their hand at 
this ... )

chris