From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <1efd792a3ee90e6dd21ffbb41efc51e5@centurytel.net> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Archiving appliance From: "Skip Tavakkolian" In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 13:22:16 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: f6362fb6-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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, >> >>