- Less known Solaris Features: CacheFS – Joerg Moellenkamp at c0t0d0s0.org offers another installment of his excellent Less known Solaris Features series. Of note: “In the recent days there was some discussion about the declaration of the End-of-Feature status for CacheFS which will lead to the announcement of the removal of CacheFS. After a few days of discussion the ARC decided in favour of the removal.” While I’ve never personally used CacheFS – and see no use case for it on the horizon – I’m not thrilled to see it slated for removal as it does sound like it serves an important role. Perhaps ADM or SAM-QFS will become more general to support this style of HSM as well in the future.
Archive for the ‘sam-qfs’ tag
Links 8/18/2008: CacheFS
Link Dump, 7/17/2008
- Elektronkind: OpenSolaris 2008.11 – A Preview For The Storage Admin – A look at upcoming storage technologies in OpenSolaris 2008.11, including ZFS, iSCSI, NDMP, COMSTAR, AVS and SAM-QFS. These products really set OpenSolaris apart from Linux distributions, although I wonder how official this list is, and have some doubts about the status of some of the projects. For example, there doesn’t appear to be much activity on the SAM-QFS OpenSolaris project, although maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. (Seen at c0t0d0s0.org.)
- Ruling: SCO owes Novell $2.54 million from SCO-Sun SVRX deal – Interesting excerpt: “Judge Kimball also reviewed SCO’s agreement with Sun and found that some of the terms exceeded SCO’s licensing authority. Through the agreement, SCO lifted the confidentiality provisions of Sun’s 1994 SVRX deal with Novell even though SCO was not permitted to do so without Novell’s explicit consent. The judge concluded that lifting of the SVRX confidentiality provisions was not incidental to a UnixWare license and was consequently not permissible. This raises some intriguing legal questions about OpenSolaris, which includes SVRX code that we now know SCO clearly had no right to let Sun open.” I wonder if we’ll be hearing more about this in the coming months.
- Interview: IT consumerization and the future of higher ed – Another interesting piece on Ars Technica from today, an interview with Oren Sreebny of the University of Washington, whose best bits obliquely refer to the challenges of miasma computing and information security. Quotes: “Lately we’ve been looking at Google and Microsoft offerings for commodity stuff, and one of the things we deal with in some of our research [departments] is government regulations about ‘exporting munitions.’ So one of the manifestations of those government regulations is that you cannot store your data outside the US if you’re working on some types of government-funded projects. Google has said, ‘We can’t guarantee that anybody’s stuff in particular won’t be in a datacenter that’s located outside the US, so don’t bring that stuff to us,’ which is exactly what I’d be saying if I was them. So we have to figure out, as we start to move in those directions, what we do about that.” Also: “[Separate identity principals for people who are working on sensitive data] is an interesting conversation because, in many ways we’ve spent the last decade trying to integrate people’s identity, and do single-sign-on, and not make them have lots of separate accounts in separate places. And in many ways it really goes against the grain to step back from that, but maybe it’s time to do that.”
Reading List, 6/10/2008, Afternoon Edition
- Jonathan’s Blog: Anything But a Flash in the Pan – Jonathan Schwartz on Sun’s soon-to-be-released (late this year) flash drives. Quote: “ZFS will transparently incorporate Flash into the storage hierarchy of a running system, using the microprocessor cache for the most performance sensitive tasks, DRAM for the next, then Flash, then disk (then ultimately tape).” Speaking of tiered storage, I wonder how flash drives would work within a SAM-QFS implementation – and if SAM-QFS is destined to wither in the shadow of ZFS: Sure it’s open source now, but where is it going these days?