SAM-QFS

Welcome to SAM-QFS Weblog

Welcome to the Sun SAM and QFS Blog! SAM is storage archive manager which manages data (both on disk and tape) with amazing ease and transparency to the user. QFS is a shared file system which scales from 1 to 128 nodes and virtually has no limit to the amount of information managed. I know there is a community of people out there that are already familiar with this software, but I'd like a brief introduction of SAM and QFS for those that are not.

So, what is SAM and QFS? In a nutshell, it provides a complete data management system but consists of two integrated software products SAM (Storage Archive Manager) and QFS (High Performance Shared SAN file system).

The Shared QFS file system is a high-performance, 64-bit Solaris SAN based file system. This file system ensures that data is available at device-rated speeds when requested by one or more users. The Shared QFS file system's inherent scalability allows an organization's storage requirements to grow over time from Terrabytes to Petabytes with virtually no limit to the amount of information that can be managed. In addition, the Shared QFS file system allows you to scale from 1 to 128 compute nodes to let you scale your data sharing with your computational needs. QFS also let's you tune your I/O access to your specific data profile to maximize your read and write performance to disk. Shared QFS is also part of Sun's heterogeneous SAN story and supports linux client nodes in addition to the native Solaris clients. We also support IBM Sanergy clients in a QFS shared configuration.

As I said, SAM is tightly integrated with QFS. The SAM adds the features of a storage archive manager to QFS. A SAM-QFS file system configuration allows data to be archived to and retrieved from local or remote automated tape libraries or disk at device-rated speeds. SAM manages QFS data online, nearline, and offline automatically and in a manner that is transparent to the user or application. Users read and write files to a SAM-QFS file system as though all files were on primary storage. In addition, SAM protects QFS file system data continually, automatically, and unobtrusively. Multiple file copies can be made to many media types and storage tiers in a standard format. This minimizes the requirement for traditional back-up only and provides fast disaster recovery in an effective long-term data storage solution. A SAM-QFS file system configuration is especially suited to data-intensive applications that require a scalable and flexible storage solution, superior data protection, and fast disaster recovery. This solution also includes an integrated volume manager, automated and flexible policy management, GUI-based management tools.

On the whole SAM-QFS solution solves data management needs with ease and reliability and we're just getting better and bigger. Look here for technical discussion around SAM-QFS and it's future development.

Ted

Posted at 01:20PM Feb 21, 2007 by Ted Pogue in Sun  |  Comments[7]