Evolution of the CERNBox platform to support the Malt project

Hugo González Labrador,Piotr Jan Seweryn,Jakub T Mościcki,Diogo Castro,Sebastien Dellabella,Apostolos Smyrnakis,Luca Mascetti,Giuseppe Lo Presti,Sebastian Bukowiec,Vincent Nicolas Bippus,Michal Kwiatek,Esteban Puentes,C Doglioni,D Kim,L Silvestris,G.A Stewart,P Jackson,W Kamleh

doi:10.1051/epjconf/202024508015

Hugo González Labrador, Piotr Jan Seweryn + Show 16 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202024508015

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Abstract

CERNBox is the CERN cloud storage hub for more than 25,000 users at CERN. It allows synchronising and sharing files on all major desktop and mobile platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOSX, Android, iOS) providing universal, ubiquitous, online- and offline access to any data stored in the CERN EOS infrastructure. CERNBox also provides integration with other CERN services for big science: visualisation tools, interactive data analysis and real-time collaborative editing.Over the last two years, CERNBox has evolved from a pure cloud sync and share platform into a collaborative service, to support new applications such as DrawIO for diagrams and organigrams sketching, OnlyOffice and Collabora Online for documents editing, and DXHTML Gantt for project management, as alternatives to traditional desktop applications. Moving to open source applications has the advantage to reduce licensing costs and enables easier integration within the CERN infrastructure. This move from commercial software to open source solutions is part of the MALT project, led by the IT department at CERN to reduce the dependencies on commercial solutions.As part of the MALT project, CERNBox is the chosen solution to replace Home directories of the Windows DFS file system. Access to storage from Windows managed devices for end-users is largely covered by synchronization clients. However, online access using standard CIFS/SMB protocol is required for shared use-cases, such as central login services (Terminal Services) and visitor desktop computers. We present recent work to introduce a set of Samba gateways running in High Availability cluster mode to enable direct access to the CERNBox backend storage (EOS).

Highlights

The background of the MALT project was provided in CERN Computing Newsletter [1]: Over the years, CERN’s activities and services have increasingly relied on commercial software and solutions to deliver core functionalities, often leveraged by advantageous financial conditions based on the recognition of CERN’s status as an academic, non-profit or research institute
The initial objective of the MALT project is to investigate the migration from commercial software products to open-source solutions
The CERN IT Storage group is responsible for ensuring a coherent development and operation of the storage services at CERN for all aspects of physics data

Summary

Introduction

The background of the MALT project was provided in CERN Computing Newsletter [1]: Over the years, CERN’s activities and services have increasingly relied on commercial software and solutions to deliver core functionalities, often leveraged by advantageous financial conditions based on the recognition of CERN’s status as an academic, non-profit or research institute. The initial objective of the MALT project is to investigate the migration from commercial software products to open-source solutions. The project helps to minimise the exposure of CERN to the risks of unsustainable commercial conditions. The IT Storage group participates actively in this important project exposing alternatives to commercial software to the CERNBox[3,4,5] user community (more than 25,000 user accounts)

CERNBox

MALT Applications

SMB Access to CERNBox

Communication with the user

CERNBox home provisioning and data copy

Outlook