Before blithely setting out to build a whole new storage platform, we should carefully assess whether or not any of the existing platforms, or those already in development, would satisfactorily meet the requirements so far identified. Only after completing this assessment will we be able to decide whether it makes more sense to continue with this system design, or whether it makes more sense to invest the time and resources into an existing project.

There are two (known) projects that are specifically under consideration:

• The ceph cluster operated by Cloud-Services in support of the Cloud-VPS environment.
• The moss cluster currently being designed by the Data-Persistence team.

The outcome from this ticket will be a brief report outlining the pros and cons of the Data-Engineering team collaborating formally on one or both of these projects, as opposed to proceeding with the design drafted in T308318: Draft initial data storage platform and place budget hold for Q2.