Castor: CERN Advanced STORage Manager

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 CASTOR is the old system that has since been replaced by the CERN Tape Array since ~2020: https://cta.web.cern.ch/cta/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/

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)

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?

"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 :-)

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!

Wonder how this compares to Venti[1]. It looks a lot more complicated (not really a good thing).

[1]: https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/venti/

They now have over an exabyte worth of data on tapes.

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