[RFC 004] Operation Review Comment 14

The OPeNDAP protocol has been integrated on top of the Storage Resource Broker data grid technology for use in the ROADnet project. The Opendap protocol provides a way to access data. The Storage Resource Broker provides the data management technology required to manage a shared collection that is distributed across multiple administrative domains. By itself, the Opendap protocol does not provide the data management capabilities needed for large scientific data collections, nor the data discovery capabilities needed to find appropriate files.


As an access protocol, Opendap is oriented towards retrieval of single files. For management of collections, additional protocols are needed to support:
- bulk registration of files into a collection
- bulk loading of files into the collection
- bulk loading of metadata about the files
- third party transport for managing replicated data
- parallel I/O transport
- aggregation of files into containers for storage


These additional protocols are implemented in the Storage Resource Broker.


SDSC currently houses over 400 Terabytes of data and over 60 million files in Storage Resource Broker collections. Other sites manage even larger shared data collections.