Gregor's Blog: Greg Matthews Sun Blog

MMS 1.0 Putback to Nevada build 97

A note from Curtis Anderson. He wanted to get this out to the
open source world, and thought this was a great place to start.

Please contact Curtis directly if you are interested in attending.

- Gregor

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Dear Colleagues,

Next month the IEEE Storage Systems Standards Committee will begin a revision
of the IEEE 1244-2000 suite of standards. They define a removable-media
management system designed to catalog and automate access to a collection
of virtual or physical tapes or other media that is stored in automated (robotic
or virtual) libraries.

The system defined by the standards is:
* Vendor-independent and heterogeneous
* SAN-aware so that drives and libraries can be shared between hosts and apps
* Includes cataloging of media, access control policies, and library automation
* Based on a plugin architecture that allows incremental growth and migration
* Accessed via simple TCP/IP text-based protocols

There are currently two implementations of the standard:
* The ADM project in OpenSolaris (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/mms)
* The OpenVault project on SourceForge (http://openvault.sourceforge.net),

I invite anyone who is interested in participating to contact me
(Curtis.Anderson@ieee.org) so that I can schedule an initial kick-off meeting
time that is convenient for all. There will be face-to-face meetings but there
will always be conference-call access, so travel is not required to
participate.

Please also forward this invitation to anyone or any email list that you think
might be interested.

Best regards,

Curtis Anderson, Chair IEEE SSSC
Curtis.Anderson@ieee.org
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It's taken us a bit longer than we figured, but we've posted the MMS Functional Specification
that we've been working on. You can view it at:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/mms/docs/

Most of the specification is complete, with a few holes left to plug. The majority of the spec
was authored by Paul Cheng, who is the lead developer of MMS. Thanks also go to the team
working with him, and of course to the IEEE, since our spec is really a reflection of their work
on IEEE 1244.

We're excited about this project,
and today (January 31, 2008) we had a great demo for Sun's marketing team, headed by Margaret
Hamburger, in which ADM
created hundreds of ZFS files, staged them out, released them, staged them back in, made
multiple copies, etc., all using the MMS to write to tape and disk archive. We've got a nifty
demo that we'll get posted to the ADM project page shortly.

We'll be updating this, but to be honest it may be infrequent. If you have suggestions or
changes that you would like to see, please let us know. Thanks to those that have responded
already.

Have a great day and stay warm!

- Gregor

Are You Interested in meeting with the IEEE Media Management System working group?