A Legato rep once told me about an archiving package they offered that supposedly had some features for backing up and removing inactive files. I don’t recall much of the details though.

One thing to consider is how you define an “Inactive” file. One that has not been read for a period of time? If so, how do you filter out accesses by backup software, virus scanners, find commands, etc while still detecting legitimate reads by users?

We’ve been contemplating developing some in-house tools to do similar file off-lining, as we suffer from the same infinite space consumption of our users, but we haven’t yet figured out a good way to really identify inactive files.

--

Mike Sphar - Sr Systems Administrator - Engineering Support

Peregrine Systems, Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Waters, G Scott DSTI [mailto:scott.waters@sbccom.apgea.army.mil]
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2001 2:11 PM
To: 'toasters@mathworks.com'
Subject: HSM and the filers ...

I was wondering if anyone is aware of or using any type of Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) with their filers.

We have been throwing and throwing disk space at the users and the (of course) continue to 'gobble' it up at a tremendous pace.  We would like some sort of system that ages inactive files and moves them off to 'near-line' storage.

We had a meeting with our Veritas reps today and they had nothing.  In fact they spent most of the meeting blasting NetApp.

In your responses please do not talk about quotas and all that good stuff.  The current thought process is to allow 'unlimited storage' ... we just need to manage it through HSM.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Scott Waters
Technical Manager - DSTI
Network Systems Team - US Army HQ SBCCOM
scott.waters@sbccom.apgea.army.mil