About SRB

The SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB) is client-server middle ware that provides a uniform interface for connecting to heterogeneous data resources over a network and accessing replicated data sets. Metadata support in SRB provides a way to access data sets and resources based on their attributes rather than their names or physical locations.

More information about it can be found at the official SRB site

For users of resources of ARCS services, three features of SRB are of particular interest:

1. support for meta data
2. the possibility to use SRB for data staging (in and out) from grid compute jobs
3. fine levels of access control

SRB is being used as the primary means of storing and accessing data with in the ARCS Data Fabric

SRB graphical and command line clients are available for many platforms (Macintosh, Linux/Unix and Windows).

Hermes

Hermes is a multi-platform graphical user interface which currently supports GridFTP as well as SRB. It can move data between these and a local filesystem. It also has as an architecture supporting the addition of custom metadata interfaces specific to institutional metadata repositories.

If you wish to use Hermes with the ARCS Data Fabric see here

Scommands

Another way to access SRB are the command line based Scommands which are available for all platforms. Note that the binary packages on the SRB website are not able to use GSI authentication.

ARCS has binary packages with GSI authentication support available for Linux Redhat/CentOS 5 and Mac OS 10.5.x. Please contact help@arcs.org.au for more information. -- StephenMcMahon - 11 Nov 2008