[uug] Tape changer as block device?

[Robert LeBlanc]

I'm looking to see if anyone knows of a product/application/etc that will present a tape changer as a standard block device. This could be Linux or Windows based or an appliance. We are looking into technologies that will tier disk blocks on a SAN to multiple tiers based on the activity of those blocks. Blocks that are highly active will be promoted to 15K or SSD, blocks that have not seen activity in a while will demote to SATA. I would really like to extend that to one more tier .... tape. The nature of tape is such that this is not a natural fit for what I want to accomplish, but it seems with an intelligence layer it could be done.

I've seen tape emulators, but I want the other way a round. There are some vendors that do HSM (Hierarchial Storage Management) like stuff to tape, but it is usually at the file/object level and the solutions have to go in between the server and look at everything and be smart about what it sees. Since we are already looking to put a virtualization layer that moves blocks from one set of block storage to another, we would not incur a performance hit (other than the hit to read from tape) to move between block devices. We are also trying to be agnostic to what the data is that is being stored, we don't want to have to know what the data is to move it around, we just want to know it's performance characteristics.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd be happy to hear them.

Thanks,
Robert LeBlanc

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