art with code

2010-10-22

Storage visions

Some sort of user-friendly UI to ZFS+Plan9. One big main filesystem that spans several drives and automatically does striping, mirroring and versioning. Fast drives are used as cache, big drives as mirrors and history.

Plug in a new internal drive and usable space, redundancy and total performance grows by some percentage of the new drive's specs. Bring a new computer in the local area network and the filesystems on the computers are merged into a network-wide filesystem, adding usable space, redundancy and performance.

Pull out a drive and the file system rebalances itself over the remaining drives. If some files require the pulled out drive, display notification and freeze the files until the drive is restored. Use a disk utility to separate a drive from the filesystem into a new filesystem, the utility copies files unique to the drive to other drives and disconnects and formats the separated drive when done.

Computers on the local network are used as page cache and as mirrors of the filesystem. Cloud service is used as a backup mirror and remote sync. Treat the entire memory hierarchy and network as parts of the same single filesystem. When on the network, it doesn't matter which computer or which disk has the file, apart from performance.

Transient devices carry a small local cache of the important things on the filesystem, and access the rest of the filesystem over the network. Either by connecting to the home network or by going through the cloud service. The local cache of the filesystem prioritizes metadata over the actual data and access to the actual data can usually be done by streaming a low-bandwidth version.

*mirrorshades*
*techno soundtrack*
*sunrise*

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