MMS Functional Specification Now Posted
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
Hi Gregor,
I was just looking for info on Solaris HSM solutions and found these pages. The ADM/MMS project looks very interesting - hopefully more info will appear on the ADM project page soon. Is ADM going into the ON source tree or is it in a private branch? I couldn't find anything in the source browser. (Actually I think ADM is an unfortunate acronym because a free text search for it will pick up all the uses of adm as an abbreviation for admin!) I didn't know there was any progress in developing ADM code until I saw in this blog entry that you already have a working demo. Great! When can we get to try it?
I'm curious about what should be the future direction of HSM in [Open]Solaris. Will SAM/QFS eventually be fully open-sourced and integrated into Solaris, or is ADM/MMS+ZFS intended to become the freeware equivalent? I find it hard to imagine that Sun would want to give away SAM-FS as part of a future Solaris release, given how much it costs now. However, since SAM pre-dates ZFS, it's not a great fit for ZFS since it is a separate file system that would only use the ZVOL feature of ZFS. In this sense, ADM integrated with ZFS sounds like it could be the perfect marriage, but how long would we have to wait, given that you have to start the whole HSM software design from scratch, and how happy will Sun be for you to put time into developing a free feature that could kill off their premium HSM product?
Do you have a roadmap for ADM putback?
regards,
Graham
(sorry for the long ramble)
Posted by Graham on February 11, 2008 at 11:31 AM CST #
Hi Graham,
ADM and MMS started as engineering projects that will be open sourced. The plan is to open source the software. We hope to deliver the software in future OpenSolaris distribution and embedded systems. Gregor can confirm, but I believe ON is being considered for MMS and NWS for ADM, but I could be confused on this point.
Regarding the name, ADM is an engineering project name and the name was repeated as open source project. What Sun decides to call the service in an OpenSolaris distribution remains to be determined. I'm sure you and others posting to this blog will have your own ideas on what this should be called.
A goal of this project is to provide a standard or open HSM archive service that could work with any file system. SAM, which is sold by Sun today as a standalone software package is tightly integrated with a QFS local file system on Solaris. It's a great product with many loyal users. It provides the archiving infrastructure for many of the tiered storage and archiving solutions sold by Sun today. Last April, Sun announced its decision to open source all Solaris storage software. Our plan is to open source SAM and QFS. We're getting closer too. Project pages are posted on OpenSolaris. This doesn't mean we will give the commercial distributions of the software away for free. It means we will freely distribute the source and users that decide to use it in production will choose to pay for the commercial distributions and services. The business model hasn't changed and opensourcing the software doesn't change that. The software is distributed on an embedded system called CIS or Content Infrastructure System. Embedded systems deliver the value of the software yet the software isn't free but included in the price for the system or solution offered. Check out the SAM/QFS project pages for more details about the plans for SAM and QFS.
A key design goal for ADM was to provide a standard interface in which any file system could leverage this service. And though we don't expect ADM to replace SAM, we recognise the importance of providing an HSM for ZFS as a core function of the storage software stack. We expect that other projects and programs will also want to leverage the Media Management capability, however ADM will be one of the first products to consume the MMS function. The opensource effort will be a phased approach with MMS possible in June and ADM in September.
Online demos will be posted to the project pages when they are available. For now there is a great ADM source tour available.
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/adm/WhatisADM/
Posted by Margaret on February 11, 2008 at 09:58 PM CST #
Hi Margaret,
thanks for the detailed reply. It answers a lot of things that actually aren't stated in either the SAM/QFS or ADM project pages on OpenSolaris. Your comments on the plans and implications for open-sourcing SAM/QFS are the clearest statement I've seen anywhere. You've said that I can find more information on plans for SAM/QFS on its opensolaris project page, but actaully the only descriptions to be found there are more like marketing blurb for the SAM/QFS commercial product, not any clear statement of the terms of reference for the opensolaris project. In fact, the open-source code that has been posted for SAM/QFS is all under the banner of tools to 'manage your SAM/QFS' environment, which led me to believe that the SAM/QFS 'project' on opensolaris was not about open-sourcing SAM/QFS itself but just the provision of some open-source interface tools. Thanks for clarifying this position. The ADM project page does more in the way of explaining the project purpose, but I do hope to see more material posted there. At present I'm commenting on this blog because even the discussions page of this project is still empty.
I'm not trying to be critical here, I'm just giving feedback on how the projects look from an outsider's perspective. I know you're all really busy but I hope the project leaders can find time to keep their pages active and informative. Thanks again for outlining the plans and timescales in your reply.
Posted by Graham on March 06, 2008 at 05:19 PM CST #