dCache - main page

dCache workshop registration open !

This years dCache users workshop will be held at DESY/Zeuthen, a nice town close to Berlin, the 18/19th of April. In addition we are offereing a beginners tutorial the day before.

Scope of the project

dCache in EMI

The goal of this project is to provide a system for storing and retrieving huge amounts of data, distributed among a large number of heterogenous server nodes, under a single virtual filesystem tree with a variety of standard access methods. Depending on the Persistency Model, dCache provides methods for exchanging data with backend (tertiary) Storage Systems as well as space management, pool attraction, dataset replication, hot spot determination and recovery from disk or node failures. Connected to a tertiary storage system, the cache simulates unlimited direct access storage space. Data exchanges to and from the underlying HSM are performed automatically and invisibly to the user. Beside HEP specific protocols, data in dCache can be accessed via NFSv4.1 (pNFS) as well as through WebDav. more ...

Click the image to watch the movie.

Scope of the project	dCache in EMI
The goal of this project is to provide a system for storing and retrieving huge amounts of data, distributed among a large number of heterogenous server nodes, under a single virtual filesystem tree with a variety of standard access methods. Depending on the Persistency Model, dCache provides methods for exchanging data with backend (tertiary) Storage Systems as well as space management, pool attraction, dataset replication, hot spot determination and recovery from disk or node failures. Connected to a tertiary storage system, the cache simulates unlimited direct access storage space. Data exchanges to and from the underlying HSM are performed automatically and invisibly to the user. Beside HEP specific protocols, data in dCache can be accessed via NFSv4.1 (pNFS) as well as through WebDav. more ...	Click the image to watch the movie.

News

The 6th dCache workshop will be held at DESY/Zeuthen close to Berlin at the 18/10 of April. A dCache basics tutorial is offered the day before.
WLCG Collaboration workshop was organized by dCache.org at DESY in July 11-13, 2011. (Video Recordings)
EMI 1 (Kebnekaise) released. Kebnekaise
Great success : 5th dCache workshop in Göttingen, 16/17 March, 2011
dCache Articles
European Middleware Initiative, EMI started May 2010. Factsheet
Security
- dCache.org is introducing a new mailing list :
  security at dcache dot org dCache user should report problems or bugs to this list if there is the suspicion that the issue is security related or if the report may contain confidential information. (e.g. passwords). Only a very restricted number of people have access to this particular mailing list.
Newletters and announcements.
Chimera
Chimera is the preferred name space abstraction for dCache. It is a thin layer on top of a relation database (preferrably PostgreSQL). In contrast to PNFS it is platform independent, scalable, and fully embedded in dCache. By now, most dCache Tier I sites as well as many Tier II sites have migrated to Chimera. PNFS itself is no longer maintained, although dCache does still support using PNFS as a backend. We recommend all sites to upgrade to Chimera as soon as possible. Please study the migration instructions and give it a try. You can evaluate the entire migration procedure in a safe test environment. More information is available from our documentation area.
The dCache wiki : In addition to the Book, we offer a wiki were you may find some more helpful information. Check the link to findout on how you can contribute to the wiki with advise, documentation or tools.

Releases

Release Policy

The dCache project uses timeboxing to manage the release process. A new feature release is made every three months. These are maintained for four months during which bug fix releases are made. Once a year on April 1st a long term support release is made - we call these golden releases. These are maintained for at least two years.

Golden Releases

The current Golden Release is 1.9.12 and will be supported until April 2013. The next Golden Release is 2.2 and is planned for release primo April 2012.

Current and Future Releases

2.1 was released primo January 2012
Highlights include:
- Kerberos for NFS4
- ACL manipulation through NFS4
- Support export file for NFS
- NFS4 referals
- Color highlighting in admin service
- Tab completion in admin service
- ssh2 support in admin service
- Configurable billing format
- Visualization of billing data
- NIS plugin for gPlazma 2
2.0 is deprecated
dCache 2.0.3, released February 13 2012, is the final patch release of dCache 2.0 and the release is now deprecated.
1.9.12 Golden Release II
- Supported until April 2013.
- The ultimate dCache Golden Release upgrade guide by Gerd (NDGF).
- GLUE 2 support.
- New pin manager.
- HTTP support for third party srmCopy transfers.
- Proxy certificate and VOMS support in the HTTP/WebDAV door.
- Reduced file open latency.
- gPlazma 2 with ARGUS black listing.
All other releases are deprecated and are no longer supported by dcache.org.

Funding

Information, Contact, Mailing lists

Documentation : Publications, Presentations and more

dCache, the Book

More on mailing lists
Contact : or
More : The dCache wiki

Project Partners

dCache is a joint venture between the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, DESY, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, FNAL and the Nordic Data Grid Facility, NDGF.

Project Status

Since end of 2001 our full production release is in use at an increasing number of sites world-wide and is delivering tera bytes of data from over hundreds of distributed server nodes.