Thanks for everyone's feedback on my question. Richard, your comments were just what I was looking for. I'm looking at TSM/HSM and also an LTFS-based product from Crossroads Systems (Strongbox) that looks interesting.
If anyone is sharing an HSM-based filesystem via Samba, I'd like to hear your experiences on that. ..Paul At 05:02 AM 4/10/2012, Richard Sims wrote: >On Apr 9, 2012, at 2:22 PM, Paul Zarnowski wrote: > >> Does anyone who is using TSM for Space Management (aka HSM) know if it can >> be used to share out filesystems using NFS (or CIFS)? Or are there timeout >> problems that make this unworkable? > >You can, and we do it via NFS - but it can be a nightmare at times. Both HSM >and NFS operate as kernel extensions: any problems thus become very severe. We >had someone who thought it a good idea to have an HSM file system NFS-mounted >to an FTP server for data feeding. That resulted in a hung FTP server system >whenever data was being written faster than it could be migrated on the HSM >server. Over the past weekend we had a situation where a user thought it >reasonable to copy a movie file larger than the 64 GB HSM file system into >that area: the file system was wedged, and because it was NFS-served as well, >NFSd was hung; and the incoming files could not migrate because they were in >an open state, even after the writing process was killed off: we had to reboot >the server (which in turn somehow incited the failure of a IBM RAID adapter >card and a marathon recovery effort that I'm just recovering from). A little >known reality about HSM is that the space for a file must consist of >contiguous blocks: you can have an HSM file system that is like 85% full as >incited by a large file being written, and writing can proceed no further, >because the file system is fragmented. Because of this, for file systems which >get large files from users, we have an early morning job which forcibly >migrates everything out of the file system to maximize free space. > >But don't let me discourage you from using HSM... :-) > > Richard Sims enduring at Boston University -- Paul Zarnowski Ph: 607-255-4757 CIT Infrastructure / Storage Services Fx: 607-255-8521 719 Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-3801 Em: [email protected]
