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February 14, 2007
File Placement Software
Our Storage Area Network was quite spendy, however it has rewarded us with 2 years of 100% uptime. There are lots of files stored out there that are old, or may not be academic in nature. ( mp3's )
So I'm looking at purchasing 2 items. First being some software that allows me to set up file placement rules, and the second being a cheaper storage.
For those not interested in the technical explanation of this may as well leave now.... because its gonna get boring for you.
We'll call our current SAN tier 1 storage and the new stuff tier 2. The tier 2 storage is about 1/20th the cost of the tier 1 storage. It of course will be somewhat less reliable, and slower.
So what will happen is I'll build a set of file placement rules. They'll be things like *.mp3 or file hasn't been accessed for 365 days. Then the software ( behind the scene's and transparent to the user ) will move those files to the Tier 2 storage.
With the the tier 2 storage being less reliable it may go offline at some point where I don't expect the Tier 1 storage to. The only negative effect is the files defined in my ruleset will not be accessible, but everything else will be.
The other cool thing this software will do ( among other things not relevant to this blog ) is called snapshots. With snapshots we'll be able to take a point in time picture of your h: drive or i: drive. For example last night, last week, and last month. We can then give you a drive letter for each of those. So if you accidently delete a file, or make a mistake and save the wrong file you could go back to one of the snapshots, and pull it back into the correct location. The snapshot drive letters would be read-only so you couldn't accidently save to the wrong place.
Posted by knabet at 2:29 PM