Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is a technique whereby you can store data in ways that optimize price/performance. Long ago I used to manage an HSM system for a local mainframe shop where where there were several tiers ranging from high-performance disk (expensive, fast access) down to tape (cheap, offline).
I realized the other day that I've got stuff that for performance reasons I want to keep locally, but for safety's sake I want to keep on my SAN. HSM would be good for this - I could work with local project files, periodically back them up to the network filesystem (and thence to long-term media), and projects that were on the back burner could be staged out, leaving more local filesystem space. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any noteworthy open-source HSM implementations for Linux. So we obviously have an opportunity, if I can get a few people to help out. What I'm proposing is a userspace filesystem driver (FUSE) for HSM. It would work by mounting a local directory against a backing (SAN-based) directory. There would be a few support tools, I think, mostly building on tools that are standard with any typical Linux distro. Basic functionality would be to support all normal disk filesystem operations transparently. For files not in the local copy, they'd be staged in from the backing directory on-demand. Utilities (probably cron-based) would be used to archive out unused resources and to update the network copies of files. Backing store would be primarily NFS-like, but WebDAV would be a good option (for example, using SVN). I figure that this would be a modest-sized project, maybe 6 weeks part-time work for the right people. Most of the coding would have to be in C, I think. I've got a lot of experience in OS-level functionality, so I can give technical guidance, I'm just not ambitious enough to want to do the whole thing myself. It's a chance for a few ambitious people to demonstrate that Jacksonville isn't the technological wasteland that people claim it is, put a few gold stars on some people's résumés, and do a little good in the process. Anyone interested? Tim --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
