conclusions from TF-storage Dubrovnik

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi!

I learned a lot again this week at the Terena TF-storage meeting in
Dubrovnik. First of all, when NRENs (national research and education
network providers) think about storage, they think probably about
things like:

- some sort of Matlab data that a researcher uses with a highly
specialized desktop application,
- huge data sets that come out of measurements from installations like
telescopes and particle accelerators,
- some sort of online office application like Google Docs, Outlook
calendar, or Evernote,
- live conferencing like a remote collaborative whiteboard through
desktop sharing

They don't necessarily think about the kind of data end users might
think of, which could be more like

- photo albums
- friends lists
- microblog/newsfeed
- calendar (one overlap there)
- in-app geolocation

So that difference affects how we can market remotestorage as a
must-have technology for educational institutes across Europe.

Second, as far as login is concerned, federated login through saml is
really the only option that's on the table. The good thing is, though,
that we will got offered help/advise from Terena about how we can add
the "edugain" Europe-wide saml login to Francois' demo server.

Third, about who will run the server(s), we can follow FileSender's
model: publish and document the software, and then each NREN can
install a national instance. We can also provide a demo server that
supports Europe-wide login through edugain, and for this it's not so
relevant whether that server is run by surfnet or by terena (they have
a small server rack in their office in Amsterdam where it could maybe
run) or specifically by the pilot project itself (just in a small
rackspace account we create for this purpose), since this would mainly
serve for NRENs to test it out and decide whether they want their own
national one. Institutes might even prefer to have their own server on
their individual university campus.

In discussions about Mozilla Persona and Google OpenID, it sort of
came out that the role of the fallback providing a massive potential
user base might as well (or actually even more successfully) be taken
on by adding Google Drive and Dropbox support to remotestorage.js. We
could host an apps portal that is compatible with dropbox and google
drive, and that way have a potential pre-registered userbase that's
even bigger than the collection of European students.

At the same time, the educational context is a very good candidate for
first serious enterprise-scale installations of remotestorage servers
(with saml, tape backup, maybe even integration with Terena Cloud
Drive), and the approach of one edugain-based demo and encouraging
NRENs to run their own instance would actually be an easier way to get
there than trying to set up one pan-European instance with fallbacks
and data migrations.

I hope this is a reasonable summary, Francois or Peter, is there
anything you woud add?


Cheers!
Michiel

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 29 September 2012 17:25, Michiel de Jong <mic...@unhosted.org> wrote:

Hi!

I learned a lot again this week at the Terena TF-storage meeting in
Dubrovnik. First of all, when NRENs (national research and education
network providers) think about storage, they think probably about
things like:

- some sort of Matlab data that a researcher uses with a highly
specialized desktop application,
- huge data sets that come out of measurements from installations like
telescopes and particle accelerators,
- some sort of online office application like Google Docs, Outlook
calendar, or Evernote,
- live conferencing like a remote collaborative whiteboard through
desktop sharing

I think Linked data can handle many, if not all, of these use cases.  Big data, enterprise, academic, cloud, as well as the personal data store that we are more familiar with etc.  For some advanced examples perhaps look at:

http://lod2.eu/Welcome.html
 

Michiel

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