Features - Storage Innovations:

StorageTek UNVEILS OPEN SOURCE FRAMEWORK FOR ILM

In IT management as in all things, freedom is priceless.

StorageTek announced the availability of an open source software framework -- OpenSMS (Open System Managed Storage.) OpenSMS is designed to help enterprises apply the automated information management mechanisms commonly found in mainframe enterprise environments to open systems platforms. With OpenSMS, enterprises can automate information lifecycle management in open systems environments, align the cost of their storage resources more closely with their data accessibility and protection needs, and realize the benefits of information lifecycle management in new ways.

"Though automated, system managed storage and hierarchical storage management (HSM) have been largely realized in the mainframe, the built-in mechanisms that have enabled this functionality have not been effectively transferred to enterprise open systems environments," said RB Hooks, StorageTek chief technical officer for the public sector. "As part of our ongoing effort to help all enterprise customers realize the full benefits of information lifecycle management, OpenSMS is now available as open source code so that open systems enterprises can achieve cost-effective, mainframe-caliber automation and functionality via a common, standards-based framework."

The OpenSMS software architecture exports interfaces for a hierarchy of information lifecycle management policy engine plug-ins. It also includes HSM components for migrating data from online file systems to secondary storage resources and recalling data on demand. Several standard policy engines are provided with the base, but users are free to customize policies as their environments require. In this way, OpenSMS enables data-intensive, open systems enterprises to achieve significant cost savings by leveraging inexpensive, removable tape storage media as a primary storage tier via streamlined file system transparency.

OpenSMS includes the following components:

• OpenHSM -- An infrastructure for interacting with managed online file systems using the DMAPI standard and secondary storage resources, including secondary online file systems.

• OpenTMS (Open Tape Management System) -- An infrastructure for managing removable media data sets. OpenTMS leverages hundreds of thousands of lines of code from StorageTek's ReelLibrarian software to enable access to removable-media data sets as first class objects and facilitate global allocation and remote access to tape device resources.

"The open source availability and standards-based design of OpenSMS was introduced to minimize adoption risk and encourage the evolution of a common code base across multiple operating systems and information lifecycle management policy drivers," said Hooks. "In this way, we hope to help build a common foundation of expertise that spans computing platforms and industries to help advance information lifecycle management for open systems computing into the future."