Every now and then, I like to annoy people and point out that much that we are talking about as the future in Open Systems has been done before. And today is one of those days!
I was talking to someone about policy driven storage management and what they described sounded awfully familiar, so I thought I'd do some quick googling and point them in the right direction. I found this series of articles on the IBM website.
It's worth reading up on System-Managed-Storage; there are so many concepts within it which should strike a chord with you especially if you are thinking about what storage is going to look like in the future. And probably like a lot of Bods, you've never had the chance to be indoctrinated into 'the Cult of the Mainframe'.
SMS – my favourite piece od storage software!
Spot on! I have been singing this tune for years. In fact, at StorageTek I helped take some old mainframe software for managing tape and get it over to open source to support open systems. We called it OpenSMS or OpenTMS. The only piece of software STK open sourced! Ironically, it didn’t take off after Sun acquired STK even though Sun is an open source company!
It’s still up there: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opentms/