On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 11:42 -0700, Richard Elling wrote: > [in brainstorming mode, sans coffee so far this morning] > > Better yet, buy two disks, say 500 GByte. Need more space, replace > them with 750 GByte, because by then the price of the 750 GByte disks > will be as low as the 250 GByte disks today, and the 1.5 TByte disks > will be $400. Over time, the cost of disks remains the same, but the > density increases. This will continue to occur faster than the > development and qualification of complex software. ZFS will already > expand a mirror as you replace disks :-) KISS > -- richard
Looking at our (Sun's) product line now, we're not just going after the Enterprise market anymore. Specifically, the Medium Business market is a target (few 100 people, a half-dozen IT staff, total). RAIDZ expansion for these folks is essentially a must-have to sell to them. Being able to expand a 2-drive array into a 5-drive RAIDZ by simply pushing in new disks and typing a single command is a HUGE win. Most hardware RAID (even the low-end, and both SCSI & SATA) controllers can do this on-line nowdays. It's something that is simply expected, and not having it is a big black mark. A typical instance here is a small business server (2-4 CPUs) hooked to a small JBOD. We're not going to sell them a fully populated JBOD to start with, but selling them one 50% full is much more likely. (look at the price differential between a 3510FC fully and half populated). In the Small Business market, expandability is key, as their limited budgets tend to make for Just-In-Time purchasing. They are _much_ more likely to buy from us things that can be had in a minimum configuration at low cost, but have considerable future expansion, even if the expansion costs them considerably more overall than getting the entire thing in the first place. Also, mixing and matching inside a disk server is unlikely until you get to places that have a highly trained staff. Yes, adding 4 250GB drives is more expensive than adding 2 750GB ones, but it is nominal, compared to the extra effort of configuration and maintenance. At the Medium Business level, less stress on the Admin staff is usually the driving factor after raw cost, since Admin staff tend to be extremely overworked. -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca14-102 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
