1.0 Overview of Dynamic Storage Technology

Dynamic Storage Technology (DST) for Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES) 11 SP3 is an information life-cycle management technology. It makes your essential data readily available to users, while tiering files efficiently across a pair of independent Novell Storage Services (NSS) volumes, referred to as a DST shadow volume. You create policies to control how the files are distributed between the two volumes.

The two NSS volumes reside on different devices on the same server. The primary volume typically contains active or highly critical files, while the secondary volume contains files that are accessed less often. When users connect to a network share on the primary NSS volume, they see a merged view of files on both volumes. Users are not aware of where the files physically reside. Files on both volumes are equally accessible to users. Dynamic Storage Technology pulls data directly to the user from the primary volume or the secondary volume, depending on where the file is located.

NCP (NetWare Core Protocol) client users and Novell CIFS users automatically see a merged view of the files and subdirectories on the shadow volume pair when they access a share on the primary volume. All the actions they take—renaming, deleting, moving, etc.—are synchronized by Dynamic Storage Technology across the two volumes. If you use supported native Linux file access protocols, such as Novell Samba, SSH, or Novell FTP (Pure-FTP-d), to access the DST volume, you can enable ShadowFS to provide a merged view location for LUM-enabled users of those protocols. Novell CIFS and Novell Samba cannot be installed on the same server.

A Dynamic Storage Technology policy determines what files are moved between the two NSS volumes that form the shadow volume. You can specify which direction to move files (primary to secondary, or secondary to primary). Policy filters allow you to specify one or more conditions to be met, such as frequency of use, file extensions, and file size. Policy enforcement is automated with scheduled and on‐demand policy runs. You can run multiple policies that start concurrently on a shadow volume. You can also specify a list of files or folders to be moved during a one‐time move from the primary volume to the secondary volume.

Dynamic Storage Technology allows you to seamlessly tier storage between high-performance and lower-performance devices. For example, you can establish policies that keep frequently used, mission-critical data on high-performance devices, and move rarely accessed, less-essential data to lower-performance devices.

Backup can be performed separately on the two volumes, which allows for different backup schedules. Backing up essential files takes less time because the seldom‐used files are stored on the secondary path, where they can be backed up separately and less frequently. This helps narrow the time window needed for backing up critical data.

Dynamic Storage Technology enables you to manage data more efficiently for the enterprise. In doing so, the enterprise can potentially realize significant cost savings in storage management.

This section provides an overview of Dynamic Storage Technology and its components.