3 ms·

StorSimple, 3PAR, etc. all appear to be appliances. What I am trying to get as is subtle so I will try to be a little bit more explicit. StorSimple can dominat

StorSimple, 3PAR, etc. all appear to be appliances. What I am trying to get as is subtle so I will try to be a little bit more explicit. StorSimple can dominate the appliance it is made out of to provide its services. Fusion Drive cannot dominate the owner's machine.

vubuntu 14y ago
This might be oversimplifying a bit - How about keeping all OS files, app files etc on SSD. No auto-tiering of those. - Then some equivalent of a 'cron job + filter driver' combo that moves data files to and from SSD to the 1/3TB disk? When I say filter driver, I am thinking of Windows file system mini-filter driver. Linux equivalent would be VFS I guess. How difficult is it to implement some thing like that in a pre known 2 tier configuration context? And what would be the effectiveness of such a solution? In Windows filter drivers have been used effectively to implement file tombstoning for archive purposes and utilizing reparse points/extended attributes to store the remote URI (for recalling file contents from remote archive upon intercepting a read request). It's not too hard to write a mini filter driver in Windows and use it in conjunction with reparse points to implement tombstoning in filesystem.
- cokernel_hacker 14y ago
  Mini-filters are FS level as are VFS solutions. How do you tell a thing that sits at the VFS level about multiple devices? You could probably do it, nothing storage engineers solve is unsolvable :) It certainly seems unnatural. Most of those appliance solutions (and probably Fusion Drive for that matter) implement their mojo at the block level and provide block device interfaces. This is to aid their seamlessness, it makes them a lot more straightforward to implement and it makes them a lot more flexible. I would have trouble believing it would be simpler to implement it at a mini-filter/VFS level.

vubuntu 14y ago

This might be oversimplifying a bit - How about keeping all OS files, app files etc on SSD. No auto-tiering of those. - Then some equivalent of a 'cron job + filter driver' combo that moves data files to and from SSD to the 1/3TB disk? When I say filter driver, I am thinking of Windows file system mini-filter driver. Linux equivalent would be VFS I guess. How difficult is it to implement some thing like that in a pre known 2 tier configuration context? And what would be the effectiveness of such a solution? In Windows filter drivers have been used effectively to implement file tombstoning for archive purposes and utilizing reparse points/extended attributes to store the remote URI (for recalling file contents from remote archive upon intercepting a read request). It's not too hard to write a mini filter driver in Windows and use it in conjunction with reparse points to implement tombstoning in filesystem.

cokernel_hacker 14y ago
Mini-filters are FS level as are VFS solutions. How do you tell a thing that sits at the VFS level about multiple devices? You could probably do it, nothing storage engineers solve is unsolvable :) It certainly seems unnatural. Most of those appliance solutions (and probably Fusion Drive for that matter) implement their mojo at the block level and provide block device interfaces. This is to aid their seamlessness, it makes them a lot more straightforward to implement and it makes them a lot more flexible. I would have trouble believing it would be simpler to implement it at a mini-filter/VFS level.