Re: [9fans] Archiving appliance

["Skip Tavakkolian" <fst@centurytel.net>]

One of my clients recently had an RFC for a document management
system.  The process was well underway before I got there.  Had I been
there early enough, it would have been worthwhile to propose a Plan9
solution for about a quarter of the average price from other vendors.
I went through a rough cost estimate exercise.  One chunk of the effort
would have to go to maturing SMB and NFS servers, and adding in a
snapshot-on-change feature; Another would be to build an automatic
mechanism for indexing of the content and correlating it with
fossil/venti snapshots.

I think this would be the same issue for caching servers. Relating
what the user is looking for with a snapshot will be the key.

Maybe that is what rob is working on at google. maybe not.

> I'll go first, hopefully other can correct me.
>
> there are several approaches you can take, rated here based on how good they
> sound to me (this also happens to be the same order, had they been rated by
> the 'impossibility to implement in the real world' scale):
>
> - replace NetApp with Fossil/Venti. it really sounds like a good idea. a
>   fossil/venti combination gives you exactly the same thing as a NetApp, but
>   it has the archival option (dumps), and no NFS as a bonus. (how about
>   speed?)
>
>   cons: you need to teach your client applications to speak 9p
>
> - teach NetApp to speak 9p (or just to talk directly to the Venti) and have
>   it store dumps there every night. good thing about this is that your
>   applications don't need to know 9p, and could still access
>   /n/dump/yyyy/mmdd/-style archives.
>
>   cons: quite a bit. teaching NetApp to talk 9p may be quite the task. you
>   still have NFS.
>
> - have a fossil/venti/nfs server in the back, where netapp dumps the data.
>   that way you don't have to change anything but just add functionality.
>
>   cons: you still have to deal with NFS, and Plan 9 does not a good NFS
>   server make, I've heard.
>
> andrey
>
> ps: this list is non-exhaustive, it is just what I could think of during
> morning coffee. it also could be totally wrong.
>
> On 11 Jul 2003, Anders Soendergaard wrote:
>
>> Hi Plan 9 folks.
>>
>> I'm involved in a project that is to produce archiving
>> services to our company. Besides policies and procedures
>> we need a box with a lot of disks.
>>
>> I thought it would be fun to see if it was possible to
>> use Venti/Fossil for that purpose. My wet dream is to make
>> some sort of Plan 9 archiving appliance that you would dump
>> your data on from our NetApp's. We would then have several
>> of those appliances on different sites that replicated their
>> local content to the others.
>>
>> The first obstacle is to get the data from the NetApps to
>> the Venti/Fossil server. This might be through a gateway
>> of some sort.
>>
>> Has anybody tried something like that? Or is it a waste
>> of time to try this approach?
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>>