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Comment by charmd

7 days ago

I've read that CERN is storing more than 1 exabyte of collisions data these days (up from 600PB during the last long shutdown https://information-technology.web.cern.ch/sites/default/fil...). Not too shaby...

All using ZFS, too

  • No they're not. At CERN physics data is on:

    * CTA for tape storage: https://cta.docs.cern.ch/v5/

    * EOS for disk storage: https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/eos-web/

    There is a large CEPH cluster as well but that isn't really used for physics data.

    • More specifically, from the EOS page:

      > Data is stored natively in XFS filesystems on hard disks or SSDs or on virtualised back-end storage (e.g. RADOS block devices) or distributed filesystems like Lustre or CephFS.

    • Interesting, they used to be the largest ZFS user.

      Hard to Google for it without getting AI slop on it, but apparently they built their own stack in 2019.

      Not sure I like their solution, "Meta-data is persisted in RocksDB databases using a proprietary KV store called QuarkDB." Unless QuarkDB has magically removed RocksDB's amazing ability to corrupt and lose data frequently, this whole thing sounds like a bad idea.

      Also, their data is not stored on any one system (local XFS, Ceph, Lustre), a recipe for disaster.

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