[Beowulf] Mature open source hierarchical storage management

[Joe Landman]

Nifty Tom Mitchell wrote:

>> Is there any mature open source alternatives out there? How are
>> other organisations dealing with transparently presenting different
>> tiers of storage to non technical scientists?
>> 
> 
> Just curious -- how large and how big are the deltas in the
> hierarchy?
> 
> I ask because the new generation of 2TB SATA disks appear to be
> establishing the groundwork for a list of new storage options
> including cluster file systems that run circles around NFS and large
> storage RAIDS.

HFS's and tiering in general make sense when the cost of the high 
performance storage per GB or per TB is so large as to make it 
impractical to keep all of the data on disk.

As Tom points out, this really isn't the case anymore.  Petabytes of 
very high speed, very reliable storage can be had for far less money 
than in the past.

This doesn't mean that HFSes don't make sense for some cases.  Though 
those cases are diminishing in number over time.




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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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