[dm-devel] Could device-mapper offer multi-tier storage?

[Jonathan Brassow]

I wonder how much Heinz's replicator code could work with this...

Heinz et al have a "remote replicator" target that 'logs' requests to  
a local device and then pushes them to remote devices.  I could  
imagine the log device being the fast device, and the remote devices  
being the slow devices.

So, I'm not sure how much overlap there is here, but it's something to  
think about.

  brassow

On Jan 14, 2009, at 1:43 PM, Ty! Boyack wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm seeing a good bit of interest in multi-tier storage in high end  
> systems, and was wondering if this functionality could be offered by  
> device-mapper.
>
> By multi-tier, I'm speaking of systems where various speed/quality  
> storage units are used in an analogous way to the way cache is used  
> for memory:  The most recently/often used data blocks are placed on  
> the fastest storage device, then over time gets flushed out to  
> slower systems.  It seems the trend is to use a smaller array of 15k  
> rpm SAS drives as the first tier, then flush it out to much larger  
> arrays of 7200 rpm SATA drives as the second tier.
>
> While this clearly has benefits in large systems, I would think the  
> same concept could be brought in-box as well, by using a fast 15k or  
> solid state drive as the first tier, and then pushing out to 7200  
> rpm SATA as a second tier.
> My interest is more in the large system side, but if this  
> functionality was available and easy to use, I could see it getting  
> wide adoption in smaller systems too -- just as RAID was once  
> limited to big systems, this could be a cool technology to make  
> available to all.
>
> So the questions:
>
> 1)  Is device-mapper the right layer to look at applying this?
>
> 2)  If so, any ideas on how hard it would be to implement?
>
> 3)  If device-mapper is not the right place, any idea where this  
> functionality should go, or if it is already out there in another  
> form?
>
> Thanks -- I would love to hear any thoughts or questions on this.
>
> -Ty!
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> -===========================-
> Ty! Boyack
> NREL Unix Network Manager
> ty at nrel.colostate.edu
> (970) 491-1186
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>
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