Gregory Shaw wrote:
Not at all. ZFS is a quantum leap in Solaris filesystem/VM functionality.
Agreed.
However, I don't see a lot of use for RAID-Z (or Z2) in large
enterprise customers situations. For instance, does ZFS enable Sun to
walk into an account and say "You can now replace all of your high-end
(EMC) disk with JBOD."? I don't think many customers would bite on that.
I don't see this happening, for organizational reasons more than technical
reasons -- the folks who manage storage are usually different than the
folks who specify OSes. Rather, I think they complement each other.
More interesting is the entreprenuer who builds a storage array using
ZFS in the back end. Leveraging ZFS could save a lot of feature
development work.
RAID-Z is an excellent feature, however, it doesn't address many of the
reasons for using high-end arrays:
- Exporting snapshots to alternate systems (for live database or backup
purposes)
- Remote replication
- Sharing of storage among multiple systems (LUN masking and equivalent)
- Storage management (migration between tiers of storage)
- No-downtime failure replacement (the system doesn't even know)
- Clustering
This list is beyond the scope of ZFS itself. I could see ZFS playing a
part in such solutions, Sun Cluster will support it for example.
I know that ZFS is still a work in progress, so some of the above may
arrive in future versions of the product.
I see the RAID-Z[2] value in small-to-mid size systems where the storage
is relatively small and you don't have high availability requirements.
I see it being very applicable to any high availability requirement. If
you think of availability as a continuum, it gets you a little bit closer
to perfect availability no matter what else is in the system.
-- richard
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