High Performance Storage System

Improved Spectra Logic Terapacks support

HPSS groups tape moves belonging to the same Spectra Logic Terapack for improved mount and dismount performance.

Visualization Enhancements with Kibana

The approach that HPSS has taken to monitoring is to facilitate integration by providing a suite of tools which can be used by administrators to gather information about HPSS into their preferred workflow. A number of additional tools and logging information have been added, which are documented here, to present raw statistical information captured by HPSS.

A site which does not have existing visualization infrastructure for HPSS can use our provided Kibana dashboards to quickly obtain useful HPSS monitoring. However, a site which does have existing visualization infrastructure might benefit from additional sources of data and integrate it into their monitoring.

Beginning in 10.1, HPSS is delivering templates for use with Kibana to provide more trend views. This includes server status, core server statistics, file counts and bytes by class of service or storage class, tape mounts, transfers by device and mover, and trashcan, migration, and purge statistics over time.

See the section of the HPSS Installation Guide for more information.

Low overhead read interface (lori)

lori is a new tool which behaves similarly to quaid and shares many of the same options including organizing requests by tape, callouts upon read completion, filtering, and more. However, while quaid stages files up to the top level of the hierarchy, lori uses PIO to read data out of HPSS with minimal overhead and into the selected output directory. See the lori man page for more details.

In the future, lori will take advantage of upcoming changes to enable mass recall with read recovery.

HPSS now supports 65535 alternate groups

HPSS now supports users belonging to 65535 alternate groups, up from 64.

Restricted Access

HPSS now provides finer-grained access controls than the “Restricted User” feature. The “Restricted User” feature was an on/off switch that granted or disabled access to HPSS APIs for particular users. Restricted Access replaces Restricted User as the method for controlling HPSS client access.

Restricted Access allows for a site to restrict access to specific operations by user. Restricted Access duplicates the behavior of the Restricted User feature, but also provides finer-grained control by operation such as restricting copies, creates, writes, and stages.

See the HPSS Management Guide for more information.

Files now show the type of media in extended attributes

Extended attribute calls (e.g. hpss_FileGetXAttributes) which retrieve level information now include the type of the media, for each tape reported. The media type can be converted to a more useful string with hpss_MediaTypeString(). See the HPSS Programmers Reference 
for more details.

dump_acct_sum will now dump the bandwidth table

dump_acct_sum will now present the bandwidth table (bytes read and written) by account/UID/GID/COS using the -b option. See the man page for more information.

dumpv_pvl now displays the HPSS label format

dumppv_pvl now outputs the tape label format for each volume.

See the man page for more information.

lscos and lsvol now support JSON output

lscos and lsvol now support outputting in JSON format with -j.

See the tools' respective man pages for details.

Toggle RAO on/off per tape device

RAO can now be toggled on/off for each tape device. The default is ON.

See the HPSS Management Guide for more information.

Repack will log media access INFO logs

Repack now logs information about source and destination tapes involved in repack operations as INFO logs. Individual file access is not logged for repack.

HPSS server metrics tool

A new tool has been created, hpss_server_metrics. This tool provides system statistics which previously could only be gathered through a variety of other tools and APIs.

The server metrics tool provides statistics in both human-readable and JSON format, and can also reset statistics for certain reports to generate interval-based statistics.

See the hpss_server_metrics man page for more information.

HPSS DB metrics tool

A new tool has been created, hpss_db_metrics. This tool provides database statistics which previously could only be gathered through out of band database queries.

The db metrics tool provides statistics in both human-readable and JSON format.

See the hpss_db_metrics man page for more information.

HPSS hpssmsg tool

The hpssmsg tool, which was written in C, has been rewritten in Python. It adds support for several new arguments to give users more flexibility in generating the message. It also removes support for the -u argument which was used to affect the message ID displayed in the message. The new hpssmsg adds a -i argument to let the user specify the message ID.

See the hpssmsg man page for more information.

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