The C ERN A dvanced STOR age manager (CASTOR) is a hierarchical storage (i.e. has disk and tape) management system which was developed at CERN for archiving physics data (with very large data volumes, see the plot on the right). Files can be stored, listed, retrieved and remotely accessed using CASTOR command-line tools or user applications that were developed using the CASTOR API. CASTOR provides a set of access protocols such as XROOT (the main and recommended protocol) and GridFTP. RFIO (Remote File IO) used to be supported until 2016.

CASTOR is the successor of SHIFT , the S calable H eterogeneous I ntegrated F acili T y for HEP computing, which was developed and operated in the 1990s. As of June 29th 2020, CTA , the C ERN T ape A rchive, started to be operated as the successor of CASTOR and gradually replaced it.…