Nirvana (software)

Nirvana is the result of research started in 1995 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) (which was founded by and run at the time by General Atomics[1]), in response to a DARPA sponsored project for a Massive Data Analysis System.[2] Led by General Atomics computational plasma physicist Dr. Reagan Moore, development continued through the cooperative efforts of General Atomics and the SDSC on the Storage Resource Broker (SRB), with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF). SRB 1.1 was delivered in 1998,[3] demonstrating a logical distributed file system with a single Global Namespace across geographically distributed storage systems.

In 2003, General Atomics turned over operation of the SDSC to the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and Dr. Moore became a full-time professor there establishing the Data Intensive Computing Environments (DICE) Center, continuing development of SRB. In that same year, General Atomics acquired the exclusive license to develop a commercial version of SRB, calling it Nirvana.[4] The DICE team ended development of SRB in 2006 and started a rules oriented data management project called iRODS[5] for open source distribution. Dr. Moore and his DICE team relocated to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where iRODS is now maintained by the iRODS Consortium.[6] General Atomics continued development of Nirvana at their San Diego headquarters, focusing on capabilities to serve government and commercial users, including high scalability, fail-over, performance, implementation, maintenance and support.

Nirvana History

In 2009, General Atomics won a data management contract with the US Department of Defense (DOD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program.[7] The requirements of this contract focused General Atomics to expand Nirvana’s performance, scalability, security and ease of use. A major deliverable involved integrating Nirvana with Oracle Corporation's SAM-QFS filesystem to provide a policy-based Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system with near real-time event synchronization. General Atomics also announced that digital marketing firm infoGROUP deployed Nirvana to create a Global Name Space across three of infoGROUP’s computer operations centers in the Omaha area.[8]

In 2012, General Atomics released Nirvana version 4.3.[9]

In 2014, General Atomics changed the Nirvana business model from a large government contract, fee for service model, to a standard commercial software model.

In 2015, General Atomics initiated a strategic relationship with pixitmedia/arcastream in the United Kingdom, integrating Nirvana with pixitmedia and arcastream’s products.[10]

In 2016, General Atomics released Nirvana version 5.0.[11]

In May 2018, probes of Nirvana marketing and support URLs under the General Atomics corporate umbrella (www.Nirvanastorage.com,[12] www.ga.com/nirvana[13] and https://www.nirvanaware.com[14]) and more recently branded integration offerings such as "Nirvana EasyHSM" (www.ga.com/easyhsm[15] (mentioned in a Jan. 2017 marketing slideshare at [16])) return "cannot be found" from www.ga.com or connection timeout. A "Nirvana" keyword search at www.ga.com returns only pages with archived indications. Nirvana pages and press releases archived by General Atomics are retrievable via http://www.ga.com/?Key=Search&q=nirvana[17]

Nirvana is client-server software composed of Location Agents that reside on, or access, Storage Resources. A Storage Resource can be a networked-attached storage (NAS) system, object storage system or cloud storage service. Nirvana catalogs the location of the files and objects in these storage resources into its Metadata Catalog (MCAT) and tags the files with storage system metadata (Owner, File Name, File Size and Creation, Change, Modification and Access Timestamps) and additional user-defined, domain specific metadata. System and user-defined metadata can be used to search for a file or object (or groups of files and objects) and also control access to and move those files and objects from one storage resource to another. The MCAT creates a single Global Namespace across all Storage Resources connected to it so users and administrators can search for, access, and move data across multiple heterogeneous storage systems from multiple vendors across geographically dispersed data centers. The MCAT is connected to and interacts with a relational database management system to support its operation. Multiple MCATs can be deployed for horizontal scale-out and failover. Various Clients can interact with Nirvana including the supplied Web browser and Java based GUI Clients, a Command Line Interface, a native Windows virtual network drive interface, and user-developed applications via supplied APIs.

Nirvana Architecture

Nirvana operation is controlled by three daemons; Metadata, Sync and ILM. The Metadata Daemon can extract metadata automatically from an instrument creating data, from within the file's actual data using predefined and customizable templates and metadata parsing policies, or capturing user input via the GUI or Command Line Interface. The Sync Daemon, running in the background, detects when files are added to, or deleted from, the underlying Storage Resource filesystems. When filesystem changes are observed by the Sync Daemon, the changes are registered and updated in MCAT. The ILM Daemon routinely queries the MCAT and executes actions including migration, replication, or backup on a specified schedule. For example, an administrator can set a policy to free up space on an expensive primary storage system by migrating that data to distributed retention locations based on criteria such as: storage consumption watermarks (percent full), all data associated with a specific project, or data that hasn't been accessed in over one year. The policies are extremely flexible. User-defined metadata attributes (e.g. Project, Principal investigator, Data source, Location, Temperature, etc.) can also be used to move data. Nirvana ILM policy execution occurs behind the scenes, transparent to end-users or applications.