Castor: CERN Advanced STORage Manager

6 hours ago

CASTOR is a hierarchical storage management system developed at CERN for archiving large volumes of physics data.
It supports file storage, listing, retrieval, and remote access via command-line tools, APIs, and protocols like XROOT and GridFTP.
CASTOR replaced SHIFT and was succeeded by CTA (CERN Tape Archive) starting in June 2020.
Its design uses a central database and includes components: Stager (disk pool management), Name Server (directory and metadata), and Tape Infrastructure (tape access).
Tape storage provides cost-effective, high-capacity (~100 PB as of 2013) archiving with automated libraries, though access times are slower than disk.
It includes a Volume Manager for tape details, a Name Server database for file information, and SRM for grid data access.

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