What is a DTN?

  • Speaking about DTN you can find multiple definitions:
    • Hardware – physical machine and its specification
    • Software – the transfer tools used
    • Orchestration – managing the flows, possibly configuring bandwidth on demand

DTNs usually mounts to connected file system, whether it is a Storage Area Network (SAN) or High Performance Computing (HPC) network, with network interface to either transmit or receive data files. Dedicated tools like GridFTP, Xrootd, XDD, FDT, BBCP, etc. are installed on a DTN instance to achieve better input/output performance concerning data transfer.

In science community many research groups employ a number of DTN instances, with dedicated network pipes for multiple high data file transfers, that bypass network firewalls, filtering services, BGP or QoS restrictions, etc. The challenge that research groups are facing is: “that despite the high performance of the hardware equipment, data transfers are much lower than the bandwidth provided (specialty with bandwidth beyond 40Gbit/s)”.






  • All functions must be « tuned»
    • CPU is dedicated for data transfer
    • File transfer (large buffers/chunks of data), tuning TCP parameters
    • Logical (sequential) order in sending data

read, transfer and write data

Since DTNs are placed out of the DMZ (demilitarized zone - an additional layer of security to an organization's LAN) or on a local storage networks network, for security reasons, only software for dedicated data transfers are installed on the servers with "allow" access only to the endpoint sites (not open to the normal Internet traffic).

Example of DTN architecture:

example of DTN architecture


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