Kory Draughn

Chief Technologist

iRODS Consortium

March 24-25, 2025

Library of Congress Designing Storage Architectures 2025

Washington, D.C.

What is iRODS?

Open Source

• C++ client-server architecture
• BSD-3 Licensed

Distributed

• Runs on a laptop, a cluster, on premises or geographically distributed

Data Centric & Metadata Driven

• Insulate both your users and your data from your infrastructure

iRODS Overview at LoC DSA 2024

Where is iRODS used?

• Research, Commercial, and Governmental Organizations

• Largest userbase in Europe
  • Strict data protection laws
  • Data sovereignty
  • Federation with other entities for collaboration

• iRODS is designed for long-term storage needs - 100+ years
  • Keeps your infrastructure flexible

What is the cost of running iRODS?

• The software is free - no hosted service today

• Requires time and education
  • There is a learning curve - mental model
  • Requires understanding your problem and what you want
  • Maintenance - compatibility, upgrades, etc.

• The iRODS Consortium can provide service and support

Lessons Learned

• Everybody wants something different
  • Building good generic tools is hard and takes time

• Generic solutions are helpful, but come with a cost
  • Performance is a goal
  • Providing insulation lowers maintenance burden

• Supporting multiple external technologies takes effort
  • Interoperability - backward and forward compatibility

• Administrators love metrics
  • Important for making decisions
  • Dashboards, time-series, etc.

Lessons Learned (continued)

• Important to be approachable and predictable
  • Easy to reason about
  • iRODS has its own protocol, so we provide
    • Protocol translations (blue)
    • Client libraries (yellow)

Thank you!

Questions?

https://irods.org/ugm2025

June 17-20, 2025