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Old Hand Summary: 4pm Tuesday October 24 ACS Rm 123 Dave
Skinner - Disk Technology
The next meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users Group will be in room 123 of
the CU Academic Computing Center building at Arapahoe and Marine Streets in
Boulder at 4:00 PM on Tuesday October 24, 1995. Marine St intersects
Arapahoe at 38th St; the Computing Center is on the southwest corner. Dave
Skinner will survey the latest disk technologies and answer Steve Gaede's
burning questions.
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
integration 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.
This presentation will describe research, product development and standards
development efforts currently underway which address the storage management
problem. The architecture and implementation of a first-generation product
(Fujitsu Storage Manager) will also be presented which illustrates some of
the challenges that both users and developers will face as systems of this
type are implemented.
Dave Skinner joined Fujitsu in 1994 as Chief Technologist and works at the
Advanced Systems Group offices located in Longmont, Colorado. In addition
to guiding the development of advanced sub-system and system level
products, he is responsible for strategic architecture and planning, the
technology aspects of strategic relationships and Fujitsu's participation
in various standards groups and activities.
Prior to joining Fujitsu, Mr. Skinner worked at Storage Technology Corp.
(StorageTek) as open systems architect responsible for developing both
systems and product architectures for various storage management products.
Prior to joining StorageTek, he owned and operated several Denver-area
computer technology firms who specialized in storage management systems
architecture and development.
He also currently serves as Chair of the IEEE P1244 Storage Systems
Standards Working Group (SSSWG) who is developing a reference model and
related standards for storage architecture and systems management. He also
participates in storage management standards efforts currently underway
within IEEE P1003 (POSIX). Mr. Skinner holds a BSEE from CU/Boulder, and
is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).
At our September meeting Tom Cargill talked about the C++ draft
Standard
Template Library (STL),
and its use of "generic programming".
We are working on the following potential meetings for this fall:
- November 16th: A panel of several speakers will address ISDN
issues.
- December 6: Dave Hitz from Network Appliance will be
giving a talk on high-speed NFS servers.
- January:
Tom Cargill
will introduce the
JAVA
programming language.
We are planning a January meeting on the Java programming language, going
deeper into the details than was possible in James Gosling's talk in June.
If you are using Java and would like to give a short presentation of your
experience, please contact
Tom Cargill
at cargill@csn.org.
We have a plethora of new books from our favorite publishers this month:
- UNIX for the Impatient (Addison-Wesley) is a UNIX handbook
for beginners.
- Applying RCS and SCCS (O'Reilly & Associates) is a thorough
introduction to using these tools for software source code management.
- Building Internet Firewalls (O'Reilly & Associates) is a practical guide
to building firewalls on the Internet. Brent Chapman, speaker at our June,
1994 meeting, is the primary author.
- Essential System Administration (O'Reilly & Associates) is an update of the
original, including expanded sections on networking, e-mail, security, and
kernel configuration.
- Practical C++ Programming (O'Reilly & Associates) is an introduction to
C++ programming for beginners and C programmers transitioning to C++.
- Using csh and tcsh (O'Reilly
& Associates) describes how to use these shells interactively to get
more work done with less typing.
You may check these books out using your business card as your library
card; you must be on the membership list to check books out. Books are due
at the meeting following the one in which they are checked out.
If you are reading this, then you already know! In a move heralded as bold
and innovative, the FRUUG Executive Committee has decided to make the leap
into the '90's! We will discontinue the US mail announcements after this
meeting, and instead post the meeting announcements on the
FRUUG Web Site
[You Are Here].
If you have been getting your announcements by US Mail you must register
electronically in order to stay on the list. If you wish to post a hardcopy
meeting announcement in your workplace, please print from the Web page. We
will continue to distribute the newsletter electronically to those on our
email list.
Last Updated: October 10, 1995.
Problems? Contact
webmaster@fruug.org.
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