Implementation of a campus-wide distributed mass storage service: the dream vs. reality

Abstract

In 1990, a technical team at NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, began defining a mass storage service to provide long-term archival storage, short-term storage for very large files, distributed NFS access, and backup services for critical data that resides on workstations and PCs. Because of software availability and budgets, the total service was phased in over three years. During the process of building the service from the commercial technologies available, our mass storage team refined the original vision and learned from the problems and mistakes that had occurred. We also enhanced some technologies to better meet the needs of users and system administrators. This paper describes our team's journey from dream to reality, outlines some of the problem areas that still exist, and suggests some solutions.