AutoVirt: File Virtualization

Hmmm, sound like a software version of an ARX.  I wonder what the scale is like?  How many users can you direct through one of these before it becomes the bottleneck?

Shawn

I guess my previous question should have been "How many concurrent file i/o requests before this thing becomes the bottleneck?"

Tim, DFS links being effectivly ntfs reparse points and the built-in tool MKLINK (works with UNC paths)  what's the big differentiator?

Sorry. Forgot to add: There's always the broker.... I'll have @appdetective to break free the brokers.

Hah, I still do not quite understand the broker/brokerless thing. I really wish for an article on the topic. I mean, I'm not totally stupid, I see a lot of the points made againts (and for)  in the specifics, but fail to grasp the whole picture. The philosophics behind.

It'll get rather annoying for me to get through the various brokering mechanics, so I abstain. I feel like a left out fool scratching my head.... Help me out please!

Thaks for the info Tim!

I'm not sure how to respond on the product as such, me quite obviosuly being verty concervative on enterprise use cases, while at the same time being the total geek, With regret , for my rationalization this is an odd product for some even odder use cases from a totally unknown company. Here's where I rather send me away. Off.

This "DFS replacement" is an interesting product.  A little reading sheds some light on how this solution works without any agent or client side changes.  On the client side, it appears that legacy DNS and then CIFS requests are handled by the AutoVirt nodes which redirect to the new location.  There appears to be a feature rich management framework that controls the migration, consolidation, replication and archiving of your files via CIFS.  The licensing model appears to be perpetual with yearly maintenance.

We've been following this discussion over here at AutoVirt and Klavs has written an interesting response to some of the questions asked in this thread over at his blog (www.autovirt.com/.../klavs-blog)

In particular, Klavs answers these questions:

1) What’s the big differentiator to DFS?

2) What about reparse points and MKLINK? Why do you need a broker like AutoVirt instead of just using the built-in reparse points?

Thanks Tim!

@Brian Gladstein

Thanks for the link to your blog post. Appreciated

I've deployed AutoVirt, and I have to say, it is a slick product. They have an out-of-band approach to provide a global namespace while not getting in the datapath and impacting performance.

The best comparison I can make to another product is the now defunct Brocade StorageX/NetApp VFM product. It was also an out-of-band solution, but AutoVirt has added replication and archiving features in their recent releases.

ARX and RainFinity are in-band solutions, intercepting requests and rerouting them to the server and then back to the client, like a proxy file server. One difficulty with this approach is that you have to size the box doing this file virtualization to handle whatever traffic you MIGHT throw at it, 3 years from now. Generally this means that the appliances have to be relatively beefy, and expensive to handle the load.

AutoVirt on the other hand is able to run on just a few VM's. 2 for redundant namespace servers that perform redirections to the real file location, and 1 or more data movers for performing file migrations.

The support for the product was also phenomenal, we had a VERY complex cluster to deal with in a migration, that had been in operation for years. Support worked with us to successfully migrate the data to a new NetApp Storage System.

Two thumbs up!

Hmmm, looks like the beginning of a blog post for http://www.thegenerationv.com...

@Kimmo Jernstrom

Anytime Kimmo!