CMS Use of a Data Federation

CMS is in the process of deploying an Xrootd based infrastructure to facilitate a global data federation. The services of the federation are available to export data from half the physical capacity and the majority of sites are configured to read data over the federation as a back-up. CMS began with a relatively modest set of use-cases for recovery of failed local file opens, debugging and visualization. CMS is finding that the data federation can be used to support small scale analysis and load balancing. Looking forward we see potential in using the federation to provide more flexibility in the location workflows are executed as the differenced between local access and wide area access are diminished by optimization and improved networking. In this presentation we will discuss the application development work and the facility deployment work, the use-cases currently in production, and the potential for the technology moving forward.