I haven't seen much on the NetApp site, but I read the following press release and it talks about Netapp's new NearStore product.

http://www.netapp.com/news/press/2001/news_rel_20011210a.html

Not a HSM solution straight out of the box, but definitely a step in the right direction. Last report I read said this was supposed to handle up to 96TB on one head, meaning this one piece could be the middle step between active data on the filer and archive data on tape.

Again, this is still fairly new, and I haven't heard much discussion from our NetApp dealer. We're meeting with them just after the new year, so maybe (if the details are not covered by NDA) I'll have more info to share. Or maybe someone from NetApp could shed some light on this interesting sounding piece of equipment (hint hint).

"Waters, G Scott DSTI" wrote:

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

Geoff Hardin geoff.hardin@dalsemi.com

this was on toasters in may2001

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Subject: Re: HSM with Net App Filers? Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 15:40:11 -0500 From: "Duncan Wright" dwright@enigmadata.com To: "'Cormier, Darleen'" Darleen.Cormier@netapp.com, "Joe Luchtenberg" joe.luchtenberg@data-line.com, maddog@fool.com, toasters@mathworks.com, sbrower@netapp.com CC: "Lesley Cooke" Lesley.Cooke@netapp.com, "Desai, Jayesh" jayesh.desai@netapp.com References: 1

Hello Joe, Darleen, Neil (are you 'toasters'?), Tom, Stan

May I introduce myself. My name is Duncan Wright, and I am the Managing Director of Enigma Data Systems. Thank you for enquiries about our HSM solution - I hope to answer a few questions in this e-mail, but please do contact me if you have further questions.

Our principal market is the upstream Oil and Gas sector where many terabytes of data are collected and processed several times to determine hydrocarbon prospects worldwide. Our customers include all the big ones like ExxonMobil, Shell, bp, Anadarko etc. Some customers are also Network Appliance clients aswell - for instance, Anadarko ordered 17TB of Filers last week, and our software will be responsible for managing the datasets - including project archiving and HSM.

I don't want to bore you with all the details, so will be brief!!. Our software is designed to handle large volumes of data and high speed robotic libraries . One of our biggest benefits is that our software is project based. The oil industry works in projects - like a block/lease of sea bed in the Gulf of Mexico, or an interpretation project which is smaller, and where a drilling opportunity may exist. A project can include Oracle with pointers to files spread over several filesystems, and indeed systems. A project can include several people and dozens of applications and a variety of file types. Outside the oil industry, a project could be the flaps on a Boeing 737, or an engine at Ford. In the end we all work in projects, even in Microsoft Office. A project could be a filesystem, or a person!.

We have a number of products, but the ones of interest to you will be (I think!), IDS (Intelligent Data Store) - the I/O layer that allows any application to interface to tape libraries, without modification to the application, PARS (Project Archiving and Retrieval System) and in particular, PARS Migrator.

Let me concentrate on PARS Migrator.

PARS Migrator is project based HSM. We embed Veritas's HSM engine to handle the 'movement' of files from the disk to tape. One of the issues with standard HSM is that it works 'in a panic'!!. It is reactive and doesn't allow predictions, or scheduling or 'what if' scenario's.. It causes network overload and I/O overload by generating simultaneous reads and writes and concentrates precious CPU cycles on swapping out data instead of executing users applications. These always happen in peak time!!. PARS Migrator has a management layer that allows previews, scheduling, and most important - projects to move on and off disk. We have a whole presentation on this as I am sure you can imagine, and an e-mail does not do justice. But suffice to say that the HSM interface to IDS has been written by Veritas, and is maintained by Veritas. We are an OEM for Veritas and actively market their HSM and Netbackup products. We believe that IDS is a much simpler I/O layer than Veritas's Media Manager, with the added advantage that we can make your robots work 24 hours a day because any application can interface to IDS, so silo's for backup, HSM, and general near line are eliminated and concentrated on a single I/O layer and a single tape library run by IDS.

Our focus is on reducing the cost of data. Hardware costs maybe reducing very quickly but the cost of ownership of, and the cost of data is rising as rapidly as volumes increase almost out of control. Enigma believes that it has products that can cap the cost of ownership of data and make data accessible to your users in a timely manner - personnel costs are sometimes the highest cost of all, and having them wait hours, or even days for data is a major barrier to productivity.

I promised to be brief, but have failed!!. I hope that I given you an understanding into Enigma and our products. We have offices in Houston and the UK, and support customers all over the world in countries like Brunei, Nigeria, Egypt and far off lands like Australia from our bases in the Texas and Sussex. We have a pedigree in managing large volumes of data of a diverse nature and will be delighted to work with you on your HSM requirements. We are working with Network Appliance to provide an HSM solution to its clients.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to the possibility of working with you in the future.

Kind regards

Duncan Wright ~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Waters, G Scott DSTI" wrote:

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