Re: [9fans] Archiving appliance

Re: [9fans] Archiving appliance

[andrey mirtchovski]

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,
>
>

Re: [9fans] Archiving appliance

[ron minnich]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, andrey mirtchovski wrote:

> - 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?)

netapp has snapshots however.

>   cons: you need to teach your client applications to speak 9p

er ...

>   cons: quite a bit. teaching NetApp to talk 9p may be quite the task. you
>   still have NFS.

esp. as netapp will say market share for 9p servers is approx 0.0%

>   cons: you still have to deal with NFS, and Plan 9 does not a good NFS
>   server make, I've heard.

Re: [9fans] Archiving appliance

[Skip Tavakkolian]

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,
>>
>>