The DICE Group has just published a history of the SRB and iRODS technology.
It details the 20 years of research, thought, and development that is the iRODS of today.
Abstract
The Data Intensive Computing Environments group has been developing data grid technology for twenty years. Two generations of technology were created, the Storage Resource Broker - SRB (1994-2006) and the integrated Rule Oriented Data System - iRODS (2004-2016). Both products represented pioneering technology in distributed data management and were widely applied by communities interested in not only publishing data, but also sharing and preserving data. Applications included national digital libraries, national data grids, national archives, and international collaborations. The success of the software was strongly driven by basic concepts that still represent the state-of-the-art for data management systems. These concepts include policy-based data management, virtualization, collection life cycle, and federation. The development, evolution, and application of these concepts in data grids, digital libraries and archives are reviewed in this paper.