CERN Tape Archive — from development to production deployment

Abstract

The first production version of the CERN Tape Archive (CTA) software is planned to be released during 2019. CTA is designed to replace CASTOR as the CERN tape archive solution, to face the scalability and performance challenges arriving with LHC Run–3. In this paper, we describe the main commonalities and differences between CTA and CASTOR. We outline the functional enhancements and integration steps required to add the CTA tape back-end to an EOS disk storage system. We present and discuss the different deployment and migration scenarios for replacing the five CASTOR instances at CERN, including a description of how the File Transfer Service (FTS) will interface with EOS and CTA.