A RESTful approach to tape management in StoRM

The STOrage Resource Manager (StoRM) service implements the SRM specification to recall files from tape. Although the SRM protocol has been successfully used for many years, its complexity has pushed the WLCG community to adopt a simpler approach, more coherent with current web technologies. The WLCG tape REST API offers a common HTTP interface which allows clients to manage disk residency of tape-stored files and observe the progress of file transfers to disk. In the context of the StoRM project developed at INFN-CNAF, the StoRM Tape service implements this HTTP interface. It is deployed as a standalone component and uses an NGINX reverse proxy as authentication engine and an Open Policy Agent (OPA) service as authorization policy decision point. This new service will be distributed at the INFN Tier-1 in order to coexist with the current StoRM deployments, in particular with the Grid-Enabled Mass Storage System (GEMSS).