[wg-all] New document published: The Storage Resource Manager Interface Specification

[Greg Newby]

New OGF document published in the Recommendation track:

GFD-R-P.129

Title: The Storage Resource Manager Interface Specification Version 2.2

Author/editors: A. Sim, A. Shoshani

Abstract: Storage management is one of the most important enabling
technologies for large-scale scientific investigations.  Having to
deal with multiple heterogeneous storage and file systems is one of
the major bottlenecks in managing, replicating, and accessing files in
distributed environments.  Storage Resource Managers (SRMs), named
after their web services protocol, provide the technology needed to
manage the rapidly growing distributed data volumes, as a result of
faster and larger computational facilities.  SRMs are Grid storage
services providing interfaces to storage resources, as well as
advanced functionality such as dynamic space allocation and file
management on shared storage systems.  They call on transport services
to bring files into their space transparently and provide effective
sharing of files. SRMs are based on a common specification that
emerged over time and evolved into an international collaboration.
This approach of an open specification that can be used by various
institutions to adapt to their own storage systems has proven to be a
remarkable success -- the challenge has been to provide a consistent
homogeneous interface to the Grid, while allowing sites to have
diverse infrastructures.  In particular, one of the main goals to the
SRM web service is to support optional features while preserving
interoperability.

View and download OGF documents here:
  http://www.ogf.org/gf/docs/?final

  -- Greg Newby, OGF Editor

Dr. Gregory Newby, Chief Scientist of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
Univ of Alaska Fairbanks-909 Koyukuk Dr-PO Box 756020-Fairbanks-AK 99775-6020
e: newby AT arsc.edu v: 907-450-8663 f: 907-450-8603 w: www.arsc.edu/~newby