Any HSM Experience ?

[yaffle]

Has anyone been involved in the implementation of a hierarchical storage management solution - as part of a data warehouse implementation or otherwise ?<br>
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A Hierarchical Storage Manager (HSM), is an integrated set of software and hardware, installed on a computer system, that provides enterprise-wide storage management services. HSMs can provide many different functions including automated backup, media management, archiving, migration, security, compression, among others. One of the key features most HSMs provide is the ability to store datafiles on less expensive offline or nearline storage devices, such as tape or WORM drives, while providing transparent disk-like, albeit delayed, access to the data.<br>
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I'm looking into HSM for a proposed DW, and I find that though vendors say that in theory it should work, and they know there's an example somewhere of it being done, its not directly their area, and have you talked to the other vendors, etc.<br>
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So, has anyone been directly involved with HSM ? If so, what products did you use, and what were your experiences ?

 

[jnicho02]

yaffle, I just found an article discussing storage area networks (SAN's) @ <A HREF="

http://www.dmreview.com/editorial/dmdirect/dmdirect_article.cfm?EdID=2035&issue=031700&record=2"

TARGET="_new">

http://www.dmreview.com/editorial/dmdirect/dmdirect_article.cfm?EdID=2035&issue=031700&record=2</A>

which sensibly points out that most HSM's are limited by the fact that they use SCSI interfaces when if they used a dedicated high speed network then you could pass the information around as fast as you can read it from the HSM.<br>
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I still wait in hope that someone in TT's has actually got an HSM and can tell us about it!

 

[yaffle]

Good article Everything seems to be getting bigger and cheaper - one vendor I was talking to lately was saying that by EOY2002 they'd have 288Gb disks, possibly a bit slower than standard 18/36Gb, but less disks =&gt; less frames =&gt; much cheaper.<br>
I'm still interested to hear of any real life 'big storage' experiences, as distinct from marketecture solutions of course ;-)

 

[dtornieri]

I have 2 TB of data in HSM of Windows 2000. I have one storage of the on EMC to one Library Qualstar 120 ribbons.