Interica is pleased to announce a release of Intelligent Data Store (IDS) featuring a web interface for activity monitoring. IDS is designed to virtualise tape libraries and present simple networked black-box tape based storage. This flexible, high capacity software solution simplifies the complexity involved in managing networked tape storage. IDS maximizes the efficient utilization of primary disk by providing fast data access to tape resident data. It provides very efficient concurrent access to limited tape library resources, plus has proven performance and integrity for over 15 years. IDS also provides a seamless tape destination for Interica PARS® archives through its published API.

Some of the new feature details are highlighted below.

Web Based Activity UI

A web server supporting HTML5 compliant browsers has been incorporated allowing users to monitor IDS jobs/daemons, IDS cache, and logs. IDS help is now offered online via web browser as well. This means IDS users and administrators can view IDS activity from anywhere without logging onto the IDS server. You can save the IDS URL in your favourites list and check the IDS status in the same browser where your PARS jobs to tape are being monitored.

By logging on to the web interface, the user has access to similar monitoring facilities previously provided by VMON (Visual Monitor) and IDS_WINDOWS. Like VMON, it displays currently running IDS jobs, and shows the current usage of the IDS disk cache. An ability to view the log files online replaces the function of the IDS_WINDOWS command.

The online help facility provides a guide to the new web interface, and also allows on-line access to the three IDS manuals:

• User guide
• System Administrator Guide
• API Guide

A new command ‘IDS’ is now available for starting and stopping the IDS service on the server. It controls not only the web server, but also the IDS daemons via the existing ‘ids’ command.

Three new commands, ids_add_user, ids_edit_user, and ids_delete_user, have been provided. These enable the management of usernames and passwords for accessing the new web-based facilities.

The VMON, IDS_WINDOWS and ids_help commands have been retained from version 3.4.11, though they have largely been rendered redundant by the new browser-based facilities.

What’s coming up?

• An IDS 4.1 GA release.
• Web interface for IDS Management of storage sets, tapes and data
• I.e. a replacement for Visual IDS or VIDS
• DB agnostic – No longer tied to Oracle

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