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Named after one of Wyoming’s reservoirs on the North Platte River, Pathfinder is a low-cost, expandable storage solution that enables a cloud-like presence for research data hosted by ARCC. Its core functionality is hosting onsite backups as well as enabling data sharing and collaboration. If you want to make data, reports, etc available to external-to-UWyo collaborators, Pathfinder is a tool you can use.
Pathfinder uses the Simple Storage Service (S3) protocol originally developed by Amazon. S3 works on object storage through a service called Ceph, provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Pathfinder does not handle files like Windows or traditional storage systems. Pathfinder uses treats folder and files as buckets and objects. Instead of a file path, Pathfinder buckets are accessed via a URL, and instead of usernames and passwords, Pathfinder uses access keys and secret keys. These characteristics make Pathfinder uniquely suited to providing a cloud-like data repository.
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