topic Re: Hierarchial Storage Management in Alfresco Archive

Hierarchial Storage Management

udayansr — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:32:12 GMT

Hi,Is there any plan to implement HSM (Hierarchial Storage Management) in Alfresco ?Regards,usr

Re: Hierarchial Storage Management

mrogers — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:26:06 GMT

I doubt it would be necessary to change Alfresco to use a HSM. If a HSM can present a view that looks and behaves like a local file system, which I think means most of them, then Alfresco will be able to use it without modification. There's a whole bunch of fancy filesystems that Alfresco can use.

A more interesting question may be does anyone have any experience using a HSM system with Alfresco?

Re: Hierarchial Storage Management

udayansr — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:40:55 GMT

well.. here is my point of view:
Consider there are two partitions on the same Linux System (one partition is on FC Drive (call it "Storage 1" - high cost storage) and another one on SATA Drive (call it "Storage 2" - low cost storage)).

Now initially when a file is created, then its stored on "Storage 1" and the administrator can set a policy where after 90 days this file is moved from "Storage 1" to "Storage 2", but still the file will be online and accessible to end user - so as per me there would be some updates required in the DB of Alfresco + a lot of other work..

Though I would agree there are some software which themselves have such a capability!! What would be the cons in building such a feature into Alfresco ?

regards,
usr

Re: Hierarchial Storage Management

pmonks — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:30:19 GMT

The file storage mechanism in Alfresco is pluggable and the use case you describe could be implemented via this mechanism. I believe the interface in question is called ContentStore but you should check the API JavaDocs to confirm.

I don't know of an implementation that does exacty what you describe, but am aware of community developed extensions that use the database, Amazon S3 and the Hadoop DFS for storing files. While none of these do what you're after a lot of the basic machinery would be the same.

Cheers,
Peter