iRODS 2025
Updates and Lessons Learned
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
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?
June 17-20, 2025
