Performance Studies of the StoRM Storage Resource Manager

High performance disk-storage solutions based on parallel file systems are becoming increasingly important to fulfill the large I/O throughput required by high-energy physics applications. Storage area networks (SAN) are commonly employed at the Large Hadron Collider data centres, and SAN-oriented parallel file systems such as GPFS and Lustre provide high scalability and availability by aggregating many data volumes served by multiple disk-servers into a single POSIX file system hierarchy. Since these file systems do not come with a storage resource manager (SRM) interface, necessary to access and manage the data volumes in a grid environment, a specific project called StoRM has been developed for providing them with the necessary SRM capabilities. In this paper we describe the deployment of a StoRM instance, configured to manage a GPFS file system. A software suite has been realized in order to perform stress tests of functionality and throughput on StoRM. We present the results of these tests.