Hello,

(the following is not in any way promotion for any commercial product,
in case you might have a doubt)

yesterday I have been at an informational meeting SUN Microsystems
arranged here. They are very proud of their backup management product,
SAM-FS:
"... a scalable, flexible storage with superior data protection features,
and fast disaster recovery ..."

What catched my attention was that the key features of it are

(as you *might* have guessed)

 - its user interface is *the file system*, integrating the backup,
   no extra commands have to be run, the backup just is there

 - backups are "copy-on-write", so no extra disk space is used

 - "instant replication", possibly at geographically distant locations

 - users do not even notice if some of the replicas burn down

Wow, it feels great that we have had these *key features* in Coda for
years :)

What does not feel great is that we are several orders of magnitude past
SUNs storage volumes :-(
and that we still lack multilevel backup volumes (despite that they would
fit very naturally, but also afs and dfs people missed it).

Otherwise we'd have a closely matching functionality (well, Coda does not
do file migration to tape like hierarchical storage managers, but the
disks become increasingly popular as backup storage).

It is kind of a pity SUN did not invest in developing Coda instead,
I have no idea how much it did cost to develop SAM-FS, but it would
probably suffice even for double full Coda rewrite, in accordance with
http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/misc/sloccount.html :-)

Well, that's all I wanted to share with you...

It is fun to compete with big scale commercial projects, isn't it?
We have still some chance :-)
--
Ivan