Charles Soto wrote:
> On 6/13/08 12:25 AM, "Keith Bierman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
>> I could easily imagine providing two tiers of storage for a
>> university environment ... one which wasn't backed up, and doesn't
>> come with any serious promises ... which could be pretty inexpensive
>> and the second tier which has the kind of commitments you suggest are
>> required.
>>
>> Tier 2 should be better than storing things in /tmp, but could
>> approach consumer pricing ... and still be "good enough" for a lot of
>> uses.
>>
>
> We have provided multiple "tiers" of storage for years. However, this
> usually didn't involve different "tiers" of hardware. Rather, it
> represented how we treated the files. We have everything from "staging
> pools" where everything is transient (no backups, no real SLA, wild west
> rules) to snapshots, disaster recovery replication and backup.
>
> What's really going to change everything is SAMFS. We're able to take
> advantage of $.60/GB disk on X4500, $5/GB disk on SAN and hundreds of TB of
> tape "backing store" that also provides real-time backup (our traditional
> backup windows are untenable). Most importantly, we're not tied to a
> specific vendor's solutions (though I'm very happy with our closed SAN's
> capabilities).
>
> "ILM" is essentially a necessity. You can't manage storage beyond the "home
> server" without it. I hope that all storage technologies take a holistic
> view of the storage management picture. While ZFS goes a long way to
> eliminating distinctions between volume and filesystem management, it is
> still a niche player. As much hype as ZFS snapshots get, that's barely
> tiptoeing into the managed storage envelope. However, I do appreciate the
> focus on data integrity. Without that at every tier, ILM cannot properly do
> its job.
>
Well said, Charles. It is worth mentioning that ZFS is just one part of
such solutions. To see how everything fits together, go to the storage
community
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/projects/
a very interesting project to follow is the Automatic Data Migration (ADM)
project at
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/adm/
-- richard
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