Ed's Big Plans

Computing for Science and Awesome

Removable storage as software modules

with 2 comments

Brief: I had this idea a long time ago and didn’t bother to implement it. What if I placed logical volumes of data each on their own USB key? Examples… I would place the htdocs root for an apache installation on a USB stick, so that migration of this logical tree from one host to another would just involve pulling the stick and putting it in another machine. Same could be done for our giant binary SQL databases, SVN repositories, virtual machine disk images etc..

Written by Eddie Ma

September 27th, 2009 at 11:48 am

Posted in Technology

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2 Responses to 'Removable storage as software modules'

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  1. I can one up you: why don’t you put the software that runs it on the USB key as well? That way, it becomes more self-contained.

    We actually did something like this at Environment Canada. Well, we started to, anyway. We have a Storage Area Network (SAN). So, we create volumes on various harddisk and then can present them to machines via a fibre network. The idea was to create volumes that represented applications and their data. Applications would be made not to litter their data on the system, so it would be easy to move an application from system to another. It also meant that the disk on machine X wouldn’t get full because of application Y. Application Y filled application Y’s disk.

    The only impracticality of this system is the heterogeneity of the hosts you are using. As they become more heterogenous, it becomes more difficult to shuttle your data between them. If they are all roughly the same and upgraded in sync, it’s not so bad. Oracle, being a picky bitch of a piece of software, made the upgrading in sync difficult at EC.

    Andre Masella

    27 Sep 09 at 12:15

  2. That’s great… actually, I _meant_ to go in that direction in my post, as evidenced by the title– but I ended up going a different way because I didn’t have good examples.

    I would do this, but I don’t really have too much software that would benefit from that. Wait a second… all this new command line bioinformatics stuff and associated data… that would be an excellent candidate. We should sit down and chat about protein folding some time…

    Eddie Ma

    27 Sep 09 at 12:19

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