Bulk Data Management, including the long-term archiving of massive datasets, is critical for advancing high-energy gamma-ray astrophysics research by ensuring data accessibility and scientific
reproducibility. Within the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), managing and
preserving petabyte-scale data poses unique challenges. To address these challenges, we present
our prototyping efforts for the Bulk Data Management System (BDMS), a key sub-system of
CTAO’s Data Processing and Preservation System (DPPS) designed for long-term preservation.
BDMS leverages Rucio — an open-source data management system developed at CERN.
BDMS manages the ingestion of data products on-site, replication of data between CTAO Data
centers, ensure their long-term preservation, and provide an interface to ingest, query, and retrieve.
We provide details on the BDMS architecture and its main functional blocks, namely: Ingest (including replication), Data Management (track preservation, and monitoring), Archival Storage,
File Query and Access, and BDMS Administration. Our prototyping contributions include containerized deployment using Helm charts and continuous integration tests on a Kubernetes (K8s)
cluster provided by DESY Computing/Data center; metadata handling by implementing a setup to
extract and store metadata from raw (DL0: Data level 0) data products, thereby enabling high-level
dataset queries. Finally, we provide details on current status and outline our future plans.