Federated Storage Infrastructure for LSDMA

The high level objective of the data area within LSMDA is the provisioning of tools for conveniently storing, federating, accessing and sharing huge quantities of data. The resulting toolbox is mainly targeting scientific communities, not willing or not being able to develop their entire data management framework themselves. The selection of services and products within that toolbox is based by their usage of Open Standards and their availability on the Open Source market. Even more importantly, significant focus has been put on the evaluation of the potential self-sustainability of components, due to an active user community or due to the commitment of the product teams to further maintain their products, independently of LSMDA funding. Besides integrating well established and sustainable data management components, LSDMA evaluated gaps in existing data management procedures and, in response, either established working groups in international scientific organizations, like RDA or joined existing taskforces in industry, like SNIA, on those topics. As those activities naturally require agreements on the European and possibly international level, LSDMA partners successfully joined European projects, like the INDIGO-DataCloud or AARC, engaging a larger group of communities.