[Paul Millar]

Meeting on Tuesday 2017-06-26

Attendance:

• Mikael Borg, NBIS
• Ville Tenhunen, Uni. of Helsinki
• David Antos, CESNET
• Paul Millar, DESY

1. Address some suggestions for our P10 session proposal.

We received some feedback from TAB about our session proposal:

1.a) Expand session objectives.

Yes, and add “attract more user communities” as an item.

AP/ Paul to expand on the objectives.

1.b) Missing agenda for session.

We discussed an agenda for the meeting, coming up with:

• Introduction and summary from P9 meeting /15 min
• Outreach plans (industry and other scientific communities)
  with help from audence. /10 min
• Process/procedure discussion. /10 min
• Road-test procedure — adding a new term.  /10 min
• Next steps: /5 min

AP/ Paul to update P10 proposal adding the agenda.
AP/ Paul invites ANDS to give a PoolParty talk.

1.c) Mention in the proposal that the case-statement is being worked on, strengthening the parts that TAB found weak.

AP/ Paul to add this to the session proposal.

2. Brain-storm on a new (friendlier) name for our group.

After a short discussion, the group decided to go with Mikael’s suggestion: Storage Service Definitions WG

3. Start addressing the points raised from the TAB review of our case-statement.

3.a) One criticism was the lack of industry participation.

Paul reported he asked his colleague with links with storage industry through his work on the NFS protocol standardisation. He reported that PrimaryData were somewhat interested, but wanted a document describing the work; however, they were mostly interested if another big player was involved; they felt it would be too much work by themselves.  Oracle were somewhat skeptical that the project would succeed, given their experience working on the T-10 standard.

Ville has direct contacts with Dell and HP, has access to support channels with CEPH and Microsoft.  Although these contacts would not be the right contacts, Ville said he would try to use them who would be the right person to talk with.

AP/ Ville to contact various companies to try to establish with whom we can talk.

Ville also expressed concern that we don’t have some readily dissemble high-level information on what are the group’s aims.

Mikael felt that this “document” should be our group’s home-page, which is currently not very informative.  The definition from the previous plenary (P9) provides a good starting point.

AP/ Paul to work with the others in fixing the group’s home-page, so we can use it when talking with others.

David mentioned he has had contact with IBM in the past and could try to use those contacts to identify someone within IBM who may be interested in collaborating.

AP/ David to try to contact IBM and identify with whom we can talk.

3.b) Another criticism was that the initial membership showed a European bias.

Paul described how he has emailed some contacts in Australia and USA to see if people would be interested in the WG.

There was a discussion on whether it would make sense to request a joint session.  The consensus opinion was that this is an interesting idea, but that it is too early for us to request such sessions.

Instead, people agreed to turn up to similar themed break-out sessions (e.g., Data Technology Foundations IG) and invite people to participate in our WG session.

AP/ Paul to send an email inviting DFT IG members to our session at P10.

David described the TERENA store-group[1] has partially morphed into the GEANT SIG-CISS group[2].  This group may be interested in the work we are doing.

[1] https://www.terena.org/activities/tf-storage/
[2] https://www.geant.org/Innovation/SIG_TF/Pages/SIG-CISS.aspx

AP/ David to contact with GEANT SIG-CISS group — BLOCKING on home-page updated.

Final remarks:

People were generally happy with the choice of video technology and that we should use this for future meetings.

Discussion