A Staging Storage Sharing System for Data Handling in a Multisite Scientific Organization

In large scientific organizations, the laboratory experiments produce a huge amount of data and their processing and storage management are a challenging issue. Cloud architectures are exploited here and there for storage solutions and data sharing as well, in order to realize a collaborative world wide distributed platform. Large experimental facilities manage by themselves Information and Communications Technology (ICT) resources such as compute, networking and storage, while small experimental laboratories are demanding more and more departmental ICT resources for their own scientific instruments aided by data acquisition and control systems, specially in terms of storage and sharing/publishing data solutions. ENEA Staging Storage Sharing (E3S) system has been developed over the ENEA ICT infrastructure using Owncloud as architectural component for file syncing and sharing, trying to answer to these needs. E3S provides an homogeneous platform able to store and share heterogeneous data produced by many different laboratories geographically spread on several sites and working on collaborative projects. A first deployment of E3S works in a project for cultural heritage diagnostics involving several laboratories in different ENEA sites producing schema-free data. The paper presents the first deployment of E3S and a performance analysis of the architectural components. The performance analysis has been carried out with customized benchmark tools on a test bed consisting of a HPC cluster over Infiniband mounting a high performance storage.