With little fanfare and no formal announcement (until now), Available Suite became part of the Network Storage OpenSolaris Project, as is now included in Solaris Express as of build 68.
Sun StorageTek Availability Suite, or AVS for short, is an OpenSolaris Community project that provides two filter drivers; Remote Mirror Copy & Point in Time Copy, a filter-driver framework, and an extensive collection of supporting software and utilities.
The Remote Mirror Copy and Point in Time Copy software allows volumes and/or their snapshots, to be replicated between physically separated servers in real time, or by point-in-time, over virtually unlimited distances. Replicated volumes can be used for tape and disk backup, off-host data processing, disaster recovery solutions, content distribution, and numerous other volume based processing tasks.
As shown below, one can configure the software to replicate any number of master volumes or their snapshots, to any number of remote host as a remote volume, of which these remote volumes may also have one or more snapshots. Independent of remote replication, a host can also be configured with any number of snapshots, establishing a 1-to-1 or 1-to-many relationship between master and shadow volumes.
Background
This OpenSolaris project is based on the unbundled product set known as Sun StorageTek Availability Suite, a Solaris 8, 9 & 10 product, available on SPARC and x64/x86 platforms.
*Overview
*Documentation
*Features and Benefits
*Details
Technology
Availability Suite was developed to interpose itself on the I/O stack of a block device, providing a filter driver framework with the means to intercept any I/O originating from an upstream file system, database or application layer I/O. This framework provides the means for Availability Suite to offer snapshot and remote replication data services for UFS, QFS, VxFS, and most recently the ZFS filesystems, plus various databases like Oracle, Sybase and PostgreSQL, and even raw application I/Os. By providing a filter driver at this point in the Solaris I/O stack, it allows for any number of data services to be implemented, without regard to the underlying block storage that they will be configured on.
As a snapshot and replication solution, the framework allows both the source and destination block storage devices to not only differ in physical characteristics (DAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc.), but also logical characteristics such as in RAID type (0, 1, 5, Z), volume managed storage (i.e., SVM, VxVM), lofi, zvols, even ram disks.
Community Involvement
By providing this filter-driver framework, two working filter drivers, and an extensive collection of supporting software and utilities, it is envisioned that those individuals and companies that adopt OpenSolaris as a viable storage platform, will utilize and enhance the existing II & SNDR data services, plus have offered to them the means in which to develop their own block-based filter drivers, further enhancing the use and adoption of an OpenSolaris Storage Platform.
Project Deliverables
Available on the files download page
An evolving set of documentation for enhancing the existing filter driver, the I/O framework, or developing new filter drivers.