Sometimes investigating new technology feels like a giant waste of time. For all the promise of Hierarchical Storage Management or HSM, our friends at the Chicago-based ABN-Amro Bank are doing what they would have done if vendors hadn't waived the promise of better storage: they are buying optical disks and copying files manually to free up some room on their magnetic drives. I first started working with them on evaluating this technology last fall, and we tested three products from Avail Systems, MicroDesign International, and Cheyenne Software. The first two I wrote about in cols. 17-20. In this column, we turn to our tests of Cheyenne's HSM software. I went out in April to help them get it installed. The day was promising, as the installation was relatively painless: once we resolved the various SCSI issues, it took less than an hour to get it up and running. The HSM software automatically upgraded Btrieve and other supporting NLMs without asking, which was somewhat off-putting. Once we went through several trial runs, there were several things that Graham Plonski, a senior network integrator with the bank's Treasury and Capital Markets group, liked about Cheyenne's HSM product. It had the nicest user interface of the three products tested, and its Windows-based installer was the easiest of the three as well. It is designed to closely follow the NetWare 4.x data migration standards and thus appealing to ABN, which was in the process of moving to 4.1 on their servers. Also, the software allowed you to remove an optical platter from the jukebox and see what files are stored on it from a standalone optical drive -- which had its appeal for off-site storage and disaster recovery needs of the bank. However, there were two showstoppers for the Cheyenne software, and ultimately both of these caused the bank's staff to reject this solution. First was that the product was only compatible with Cheyenne's backup and virus protection software to the exclusion of competitor's products. While the bank was pretty happy with using Arcserve to mirror their standby NetFrame server, they had other backup software in use as well, and these products didn't work well with the Cheyenne HSM solution. But the virus scanning software was an even bigger issue. The bank used Central Point/Symantec's virus protection products, and when these scanned their disk drives, they would change the access date of the files on the disk. This would setup what is called a "runaway recall," meaning that the HSM software thinks all these files have been opened by real humans. It then tries to recall all these files back to magnetic storage. It was a pitiful thing to watch as all these unneeded files were brought back on-line, filling up the magnetic disks. "We were afraid of this, especially for a 1.0 version of software," said Plonski. "Our worst fears were realized." But the virus scan was just one issue. A second problem was the lack of notification software. While they have a 4 kilobyte TSR that notifies users when they are running DOS, it doesn't work when they are in Windows. This means that when a user tries to access a migrated file, nothing happens while the file is being recalled. Supposedly, Cheyenne is working on a fix, but we didn't see this before our tests were concluded. Where does this leave the bank? Plonski told me: "Because of the lack of compatibility with our virus protection and backup products, we had little choice but to discontinue our evaluation of Cheyenne's HSM product. While Central Point and DataJet are less than perfect products, these are the choices that we made. We can't just throw away systems we run in production to make ourselves compatibile with Cheyenne's HSM software. We have to wait for them to come to us." ABN has discontinued their evaluation of HSM software. Our frustration with HSM products seems to be widely held. Some of you wrote in after the first series with your own experiences of HSM products. One reader, John Pence, who works for a Memphis-based publishing firm, already uses Cheyenne's Arcserve backup software: "I've got files that date back to the dawn of time and I'd love to migrate them off my disks," he said. "However, I'm not impressed with Arcserve, so I don't have much confidence that their HSM product would work very well." Pence is running mirrored System Fault Tolerance III NetWare servers presently, which tends to limit the number of third-party products that will work in that environment. Others had similar comments, and said they were steering clear of HSM for the time being. And after investing all this time and effort into evaluating the technology, count me among them. Data: HSM for NetWare v1.0 $6995 plus $495 per additional servers Cheyenne Software 3 Expressway Plaza Roslyn Heights, NY 11577 516 484 5110 516 484 3446 fax
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David Strom
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