29 January 2009

GridPP DPM toolkit v2.2.0 released

Hot on the heels of v2.1.0 comes v2.2.0. This one contains a couple of new tools that have been created to allow sites to have a greater understanding of what is happening with their space tokens. These are:

* dpm-sql-spacetoken-usage

This displays information like:



* dpm-sql-spacetoken-list-files



Unfortunately, I have had to use some SQL to directly query the DB as the API doesn't support this functionality. I'm hoping that the small DB schema change in v1.7.0 of DPM doesn't break these tools too much... These tools were born out of some discussion which has taken place over the past couple of days on our gridpp-storage mailing list (anyone can join!). Thanks to those who tested out the initial releases of the tools.

I have also made another change to dpns-su. I have added another new switch (-s, --summary) for dpns-du which will present a summary of the total size under a target directory rather than the default behaviour which displays the summary for every sub-dir under the target.

You can get it from the usual place (although it will take a day for te yum repodata to update). Again, the release notes on the wiki will be updated at some stage...

23 January 2009

GridPP DPM toolkit v2.1.0 released

I've built a new release of the DPM admin toolkit. This one contains a couple of new tools that have been created by Sam Skipsey. They both present the user with a breakdown of the storage used in the DPM per user/group. One tool uses the DPM python API to do this (and is correspondingly slow) while the other directly talks to the DPM database using the python SQL module. Fingers crossed that this should present the same numbers as are calculated by the GridppDpmMonitor.

There is also a new switch for dpns-du which stops directories of zero size being printed to stdout. Yes Winnie, this one's for you.

You can get it from the usual place. Some of the release notes have to be updated for the new tools as I haven't got round to that yet...

05 January 2009

The evolution of storage in 2008


I've been running my WLCG storage version monitoring system for 1 year so I thought now would be a prudent time to have a quick review of the changes in the storage infrastructure over the past year. The above image shows the count of each different version of the SRM2.2 storage middleware that is deployed on the Grid each day. Over the course of the year the number of deployed SRM2.2 endpoints increased steadily from ~100 to >250.

The pie charts below show the breakdown (as of today) for the different versions of DPM, dCache and CASTOR that are running on the Grid. There are also 20 instances of StoRM out there, but StoRM does not appear to return versioning information from an srmPing operation so it's not possible to tell what version is deployed.







DPM clearly dominates in terms of number of running instances. Hopefully CERN doesn't do something crazy like drop support for it! It's interesting to see that there are still many old versions of the software running at sites. Perhaps this is an indication of the success of SRM in that all of these different implementations are still talking to each other.