Experiences with Supporting Mass Storage for Multiple Communities

Access to reliable high capacity and high performance storage is becoming increasingly important to many scientific projects. Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) runs a Petabyte-scale mass storage facility (ADS) which serves a wide range of scientific communities, from within the research council, from other research councils, and other communities. In this paper we describe our experiences with supporting a diverse scientific community, and to which extent our facility can enable data integration between the communities, both with the storage system itself, and with added Grid interfaces and other higher-level Grid tools.