File Systems and FILE Management

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The Abstracts

DFS Over CIFS
Matthew Geddes
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Distributed File System (DFS) as part of the CIFS protocol is an often-overlooked tool to assist large and small CIFS installations in scaling and migrating storage. It is not without its challenges, but can be a useful tool to the CIFS-centric administrator. This tutorial will describe the problems DFS can be used to solve, DFS configuration, performance and data availability considerations, and hints and kinks for using DFS.

Learning Objectives

To familiarize users with a useful, but oft-overlooked feature of the CIFS protocol
To arm users with a set of DFS use-cases
To set user expectations on the performance and limitations of DFS.

Storage Tiering for File & NAS Systems
Ashvin Kamaraju
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Unstructured data is growing exponentially and forecasted to grow to nearly a thousand exabytes by the year 2011. Enterprises are struggling with the ever increasing costs of storing and managing unstructured data. Multiple classes of storage, with differing price/performance characteristics can help mitigate the costs of managing unstructured data but only when there are meaningful definition of policies that are relevant for the specific business or enterprise. File systems and NAS systems, which serve as repositories for unstructured data, must implement file management policies that automate file life cycle management and migration between tiers of storage, while preserving the ability to access them without operator intervention and providing location transparency to applications. Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is a well known & commercially available technology that implements policy based file migration. However, its adoption has been limited and poor, due largely to the use of tape media as a secondary tier of storage and the limitations inherent in tape media. This session will survey the various storage tiering technologies available today, in file systems and NAS systems, and the policies that automate tiering. It will cover HSM, file systems that can inherently handle multiple classes of disk storage in a single name space/file system, File Area Networks (FAN) that can migrate data between NAS systems and purpose built archival storage subsystems such as MAID arrays. The objective of the session is to provide the attendees with the benefits of storage tiering and the policies that automate tiering to manage costs

Learning Objectives

Understand the industry trends driving the need for multiple classes of storage
Develop an understanding of various storage tiering technologies available today in file and NAS systems and the pros & cons of each of them.
Understand policies for file life cycle management.

The File Systems Evolution
Christian Bandulet
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File Systems impose structure on the address space of one or more physical or virtual devices. Starting with local file systems over time additional file systems appeared focusing on specialized requirements such as data sharing, remote file access, distributed file access, parallel files access, HPC, archiving, security etc.. Due to the dramatic growth of unstructured data files as the basic units for data containers are morphing into file objects providing more semantics and feature-rich capabilities for content processing.

This presentation will categorize and explain the basic principles of currently available file systems (e.g. local FS, shared FS, SAN FS, clustered FS, network FS, WAFS, distributed FS, parallel FS, object FS, ...). It will also explain technologies like NAS aggregation, NAS clustering, scalable NFS, global namespace, parallel NFS, storage grids and cloud storage. All of these files system categories are complementary. They will be enhanced in parallel with additional value added functionality. New file system architectures will be developed and some of them will be blended in the future.

Learning Objectives

Understand the basic principles of different files system architectures
Understand how file systems evolved over time
Being prepared to discuss, position and recommend the most appropriate file system for a customer solution

Find and Select the Right File Storage for Your Applications
Philippe Nicolas
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Many businesses are linked to file storage technologies as many of these new, recent and even existing applications morph now, rely and support file based data. At the same time, the volume of data explodes especially the file data type which now represents by far the larger portion of enterprise data. With the complexity and variety of market solutions, the challenge for IT buyers and storage managers is to choose and adopt the most adapted solutions aligned to their business and IT needs to address their current and future challenges with a special attention to compliance and data retention regulations. This session covers the most common deployed applications, their attributes in term of file storage needs and maps these to file storage solutions available in the industry with technologies details and advantages. Various technologies are presented in this session, among them: Clustered, SAN-based, Distributed, Global and Parallel File System and Storage.

Learning Objectives

With a top-down approach, this tutorial improves file storage technologies positioning and understanding aligned to applications needs and challenges.
With that survey, technologies segmentation and features matrix, It helps end-users, IT and file storage buyers to select, choose and adopt the right solution.
Democratize some file storage technologies or solutions very often presented too technically and without end-users expectations in mind.