> On Wed, 15 Apr 1998, Per-Ola Mard wrote:
>
> > Is there anybone out there who has any experience on AFS and Hierachical
> > Storage Management solutions, one of them sometimes refered to as Multi
> > Resident AFS, or MR-AFS.
I must admit that I am scared of "unofficial" enhancements, like MR-AFS
(unless they seem to be as ubiquitous as LINUX, :-)
Q: are there any HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) solutions that are
filesystem independent?
It seems to me that HSM could be implemented in a disk server (as opposed to
file server) manner. Does anyone else remember disk servers?
I.e. the HSM device would basically serve disk blocks, which could be interpreted
as belonging to any filesystem. I suppose that there would be new commands to
allocate and deallocate "disks" and space in disks, much as filesystems have partition
management. The HSM "disk blocks", of course, would be moved through the levels
of the hierarchy, to tape, jukebox, etc., as needed.
Now, most of the HSM systems I am familiar with are network attached, which requires
them to talk some nature of network filesystem protocol: NFS, AFS, whatever. So I
suppose
that my question devolves to:
Q': are there any HSM devices that attach directly to a server computer, as a SCSI,
PCI, or IPI
device, rather than being network attached?
Or, similarly:
Q": are there any HSM devices that are network attached as disk servers,
and are there any filesystem protocol systems that can run on one machine
while making "disk service" calls across the network?
This latter configuration would be quite flexible, although it would be network traffic
intensive: run the AFS server on machine1, using a "disk device" which connects
to the HSM disk server on machine2. All traffic eventually going to the client on
machine3.
I say it is flexible because you could use any filesystem as the "disk server",
just by accessing blocks and lseeking.
Layering, ugly.
