On Dec 2, 2006, at 12:24 AM, Ian Collins wrote:
ZFS looks to be the perfect tool for mirroring hardware RAID arrays, with the advantage over other schemes of knowing which side of the mirror has an error. Thus ZFS can be used as a tool to compliment, rather than replace hardware RAID.I agree. That is what I am doing :-)I'll be interested to see how you get on.
Me too. Right now I have one RAID-6 (8 + 1 hotspare = 1.7+ TB) array with ZFS for testing etc. I only have a small amount of live data on it (some email stores for a few of my own accounts). I am setting up some backup procedures and messing around.
I finally bought the drives over the US Thanksgiving holiday a week ago and they arrived yesterday (8 + 1 + plus a spare for the shelf). I need to get my other controller purchased this month, set up the array, run some benchmark tests on it for a day or two as a break-in, and add it to the ZFS pool as a mirror element. Then we can start seeing how it works.
All the RAID controllers have battery backup and the system itself has redund. PS and industrial UPS feeding it so hopefully we should have minimal crashing based on power problems etc (leaving SW and HW problems as sources). The individual RAIDs are very fast. The one has 1GB of battery backed cache and the second may have 2GB of battery backed cache (once I buy it). With the battery backing you can turn on write caching with some confidence. I am interested to see how it works. The whole mirror will be exported over nfs through three separate (jumbo packet) gigE interfaces to various servers... The goal is to have it feed a bunch of "dumb" "low end" servers that do the compute work and that can be replaced in a minute on failure by mounting the file storage from the zfs/nfs array and restarting the services from the crashed server on the new server...
Cheers Chad --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider chad at shire.net
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