Oracle Database DBFS Hierarchical Storage Overview

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory creates large numbers of images during each shot cycle for the analysis of optics, target inspection and target diagnostics. These images must be readily accessible once they are created and available for the 30 year lifetime of the facility. The Livermore Computing Center (LC) runs a High Performance Storage System (HPSS) that is capable of storing NIF's estimated 1 petabyte of diagnostic images at a fraction of what it would cost NIF to operate its own automated tape library. With Oracle 11g Release 2 database, it is now possible to create an application transparent, hierarchical storage system using the LC's HPSS. Using the Oracle DBMS-LOB and DBMS-DBFS-HS packages a SecureFile LOB can now be archived to storage outside of the database and accessed seamlessly through a DBFS 'link'. NIF has chosen to use this technology to implement a hierarchical store for its image based SecureFile LOBs. Using a modified external store and DBFS links, files are written to and read from a disk 'staging area' using Oracle's backup utility. Database external procedure calls invoke OS based scripts to manage a staging area and the transfer of the backup files between the staging area and the Lab's HPSS.