Storage with Smarts

A new Contrarian Minds article by Al Riske profiles Harriet Coverston, the chief architect of QFS, who is very excited to be working in "intelligent storage":

We're really making storage intelligent. What we're going to do is say, 'Write this to objects in the storage device.' The storage device then understands that the blocks in this object are related and it can act on that. It can do prefetching. It can do caching intelligently

Harriet co-founded LSC where she helped create SAM-FS, then QFS. Sun bought LSC in 2001.
"Redshift companies like Salesforce.com and Qualcom use QFS and SAM. They love it," says Harriet.

SAM-SF is a sophisticated multi-tier HSM which "provides data classification, centralized meta-data management, policy based data placement, protection, migration, long-term retention, and recovery to help organizations effectively manage and utilize data according to business requirements".

QFS is a distributed SAN files system which can deliver "nearly raw device access to information and data consolidation for read/write file sharing".

HBO uses QFS as an integral part of managing their SD and HD digital content.

These are great products that are not well known as they should be.