The CERN Tape Archive (CTA) is the open source solution developed at CERN to store more than 1 Exabyte of data from CERN’s experimental programmes. CTA interfaces with two disk systems widely used by the High-Energy Physics (HEP) community, EOS and dCache. However, until now there has been no integration with systems used outside of HEP.

Looking at current industry standards, the leading interface for file and object storage is S3, which includes cold storage extensions for data archival. The CTA team are investigating whether CTA can be fronted by an S3 API. During this talk, we’ll review a proof-of-concept implementation, and look at alternative solutions to explore along with their respective trade-offs.