CERNBox: Storage gateway for CERN and beyond

Abstract

The CERN IT Storage group ensures the coherent design, development, operation and evolution of storage and data management services at CERN for all aspects of physics, user and project data and general needs of the Laboratory. CERNBox is one of the services that actively contributes to this objective. CERNBox is a cloud collaboration platform providing storage space (18PB) to users (37K accounts), projects (1.1K) and to LHC experiments (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, ALICE) and other smaller experiments (33). We present the evolution of the platform from its humble origins 10 years ago and how the HEP landscape has influenced the expansion of the service to continue satisfying the ever growing demand of our users. We describe the challenges and opportunities presented by integrating a sync and share solution (ownCloud) with CERN’s custodial storage solution (EOS) and how this stack boosted a coherent integration with analysis farms (LXBATCH), Linux (LXPLUS) and Windows (TS) interactive clusters and Web analysis facilities (SWAN). We then turn to the part CERNBox has played in consolidation efforts in the IT department (DFS, AFS) and in providing end-users with a portfolio of applications (ROOT, CAD, MS365) while guaranteeing a maximum level of privacy. We conclude by presenting the future of the service with its heterogeneous storage federation capabilities (EOSHOMEs, EOSPROJECTs, EOSATLAS, CEPHFS) and WLCG transfer mechanisms (WebDAV TPC).