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October, 1995: Policy-Based Storage Management
At our October 24th meeting, Dave Skinner of Fujitsu talked about
Policy Based Storage Management:
In most contemporary computing environments, the philosophy and models of
storage management tend to be heavily influenced by storage management
tools. For example, on-line data may be organized using a file manager,
backed-up using a backup/restore utility (BRU), migrated to less expensive
storage using a hierarchical storage management system (HSM), or perhaps
exported to off-line storage using an archive program. Storage is viewed
from the perspective of these tools, and the supporting policies and
processes usually reflect this bias.
However, recent trends suggest that these traditional storage management
tools and perspectives may no longer work. These trends include escalating
storage costs, periodic doubling of capacities, proliferation and integra-
tion of computing in work as well as home environments, the increased mobility
and geographic distribution of organizations and their computing environments,
and the popularity of data sharing and work group computing. Storage is
rapidly becoming unmanageable, and in a couple of years, may approach the
point where further growth is limited.
One solution currently under investigation is to change the focus of storage
management from tools to policies (i.e., behaviors or desired outcomes).
Instead of managing storage and data by employing specific tools and
techniques, the user specifies the desired outcome in the form of policies and
a set of policy management components operates the tools to realize those
objectives. By realizing policies as objects, behavior such as inheritance
can be utilized which can simplify the management of storage in a complex
distributed system.
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