▲Castor: CERN Advanced STORage Manager(web.cern.ch)
34 points by naves 2 hours ago | 7 comments
▲tempay 37 minutes ago
I’m a little confused by this submission. CASTOR is the old system that has since been replaced by the CERN Tape Array since ~2020: https://cta.web.cern.ch/cta/

This is mentioned on the page but it’s easy to miss.

For the current status of tape storage at CERN see: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1471803/contributions/6967379/a...

For reference, most disk storage for physics data uses an in-house solution called EOS: https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/eos-web/

▲bfkwlfkjf 16 minutes ago
Does tape array replace castor? Just from the names it sounds like tape array is the actual storage, and castor is an abstraction that automatically decides what's kept on disk and what's kept on tape
▲Melatonic 37 minutes ago
This is actually super useful for real world stuff. Thanks for this.

Tape is boring but when an intern / AI / tectonic plate accidently destroys your database setup it is a huge lifesaver

Anybody know what these fancy Oracle tapes are? Is it just their implementation of a regular standard?

▲tempay 34 minutes ago
See this conference talk from last week: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1471803/contributions/6967379/

There isn’t a recording but slides at linked from that page.

▲perlgeek 38 minutes ago
"Castor" was the name of a storage system used for transporting nuclear waste in Germany. There were quite a few protests against shipping nuclear waste through the country.

Wouldn't have been my choice for a software project :-)

▲tempay 36 minutes ago
It’s also French for Beaver which is more likely the origin of the name.
▲rzzzt 28 minutes ago
It's also Latin and Greek for beaver which is more likely the origin of the name.
▲tempay 3 minutes ago
Latin and Greek aren’t one of the working languages at CERN (French and English are)
▲john_strinlai 1 hour ago
looks like the image on the right is broken, but it is supposed to be: https://cta.web.cern.ch/cta/assets/images/namespace_statisti...

(looks like this submission uses https://castor.web.cern.ch/content/home.html instead of https://castor.web.cern.ch/castor/ the second link does not have the broken image)

▲boznz 41 minutes ago
The various CERN web pages such as this were a treasure trove of information when I was working on my last novel. I actually included a few paragraphs on Castor thinking of using it as a side-plot, but my editor cut the plot out along with a few other technical niceties. Sigh!
▲mrlonglong 13 minutes ago
They now have over an exabyte worth of data on tapes.
▲bitbytebane 22 minutes ago
[dead]