1 Overview¶
Data Backbone (DBB) buffer managers are two separate pieces of software. The first being the handoff manager which is responsible for transferring files from a remote location (handoff site) to a designated location at the data facility, an endpoint site. The second piece of software is the endpoint manager which is responsible for ingesting files into different data management systems operating on the endpoint site, e.g., Gen2 and/or Gen3 Butler repositories.
2 Handoff manager¶
The handoff buffer manager transfers files between two buffers. New image files are written to a storage location (handoff buffer) by the Archiver process. After successfully transferring the file to the endpoint buffer, the manager moves the file from original storage location to another directory, a holding area, thus managing what files have been transferred to the endpoint site.
Figure 1 Schematic representation of the data flow between handoff and endpoint buffers.
It is worth noting that:
- The manager is a daemon-like process running continuously on the handoff site.
- The manager considers each file in the handoff buffer to be a new file ready for transfer. Hence, for the manager to operate correctly, writing files to the handoff buffer must be an atomic operation.
- Similarly to rsync, the manager replicates the directory structure between buffers. For example, the file in the handoff buffer located at foo/bar/baz.fits will be written to exactly the same location in the endpoint buffer.
- The current transfer mechanism is
scp, so the handoff manager must first transfer the file to a scratch staging area before atomically moving to the endpoint buffer.
3 Endpoint manager¶
The endpoint manager consists of two types of core components: Finders and Ingesters. They use a relational database management system (RDBMS) to provide useful information about files in the storage area and details regarding ingestion attempts that were made for each file.
Figure 2 Overview of the architecture of the endpoint buffer manager. Solid arrows indicate file movement between the buffer and the storage area, dashed arrows show ingestion process (no file movement, only linking/copying), and dotted lines show database updates.
A Finder is responsible for discovering new files arriving at a specified location and moving them, if necessary, to their final destination, storage area. While doing so it populates the database table that acts as a single source of truth with regard to the content of the storage area. Each Finder monitors a single location, but multiple Finders can be deployed on a given endpoint site, each monitoring a different location.
An Ingester is responsible for making ingest attempts to a data management system on the endpoint site. Similarly to Finders, multiple Ingesters can be deployed on a given endpoint site to ingest images to different database management systems (e.g., Gen2 and Gen3 Butler repositories).
Each Ingester stores in the RDBMS a complete history of events for each file allowing monitoring systems (or interested parties)to quickly find out information including, but not limited to:
- at files are currently ingested,
- which ingests attempts succeeded or failed,
- when an attempt was made,
- how long it took to ingest a file.
Finders and Ingesters operate independently hence catastrophic failure in one of the components will not propagate to others taking the entire DBB endpoint manager offline. It also means that they can be maintained and/or upgraded at different cadences.