Great questions re: E3S. Will pass them along and see what Emulex can get answered for you!

cheers,

Dave

As always a good blog – raises a few more 'top of head' questions though :-
1) How doe the 'adapter' handle and treat mutable / changing blocks? (eg does it write new block object and retire the old or something more optimised (eg a mini delta block))

2) What are the scale targets for the adapter (or groupings of adapters) re qty objects, capacity abstracted, throughput & cache etc?

3) What underlying cloud APIs are used? are these 'pluggable / changable'? and can multiple be used at once?

4) What specific encryption & KMS system is used?

5) How does the adapter work with authentication, authorisation & accounting / billing attributes that may need to be handled re cloud storage?

6) What policy mngt framework is used to control the behaviours of the adapters? and how does this relate / compete / cooperate with other policy frameworks (eg Atmos's or Symm FAST etc)?

7) Does the adapter maintain the checksum history of the cloud objects written in order to validate that their retrieval matches? if so where is this data stored and how is it protected / made resilient?

Cheers

Ian

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my questions. It sounds like E3S is pretty much how I imagined it to be. I think it will be one of many “staging” products that moves us from current storage architectures to a much more diversified infrastructure. On the one hand I'm excited by the potential of making storage ubiquitous; on the other I retain my cynical self which wants to ensure the technology hype doesn't get out of control. Please keep us all up to date as things progress!