Big (and Small) Developments In Storage

louismg writes "On the same day that BlueArc released the Titan 2000 family, with performance more than three times higher than rivals EMC and NetApp, including a global namespace and scalability to 512 terabytes, EMC took a low-end approach by unveiling a line for the SMB market, dubbed Insignia. Red Herring claims that BlueArc's announcement changes the storage game, while The Register says that small means beautiful. What makes sense for today's IT infrastructures, with data growth showing no sign of slowing?"

Comments

Better organization!

[Myself]

More bulk storage only solves half the problem. As the volume of email and document archives grows, organizing and searching them becomes more interesting than just storing them.

Personally, I'm facing a minor storage crisis with a 15-gig music tree, a 20-gig photos tree, and dozens of gigs of other useful stuff that I only need on an occasional basis.

When I offload the camera, the files go to the laptop. To avoid duplicating files, the most recent few weeks worth of photos should always be on the laptop. But anything older should move off, to free up space on the drive. I'd like to keep as much of my music in both places as possible, but I need a way to replicate file moves, metadata changes, and deletions so the same bad rips and inaccurate tags don't persist after I fix them once.

There are a set of notes files, mileage logs, and other small files which I'd like to synchronize between the desktop and laptop. However, there's a possibility of both copies changing simultaneously (or at least between syncs), so I'd need a way to reconcile changes.

These little dilemmas have me wasting a lot of space until I resolve them. Stale data and useless files are all over the place, and I don't have the notes I need when I need them. It sounds like I might be able to do most of this with rsync, but the notes files, CVS maybe?

Has anyone tackled these issues before in a useful way, perhaps a sensible-storage-organization HOWTO? More space is not the issue right now, I need more sense.

Re:Better organization!

[Anonymous Coward]

You may find FolderShare of some use. It's an ad-hoc peer-to-peer directory synchronisation application.

You set up one (or more) directories on at least two machines, tell it to keep those directories in sync - and magic happens. There's a central internet server that your machines connect read and store only the file checksums. And if more than one computer is online (either on the same LAN - or anywhere on the internet), files will be copied and the directories syncronised. It's a brilliant idea.

I personally have several FolderShare shares, including a large folder off my home directory that I keep organised and know that it will be automatically replicated to my other machines for distributed backup. *And* it works well for my MP3 directory and my digital photos.

It used to be a pay service, but Microsoft bought it and immediately opened the service for free to everyone. I believe their primary intent is for it to be a part of Windows Live when Windows Vista launches. FYI, there are Windows and Mac clients.