On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Jim Davis wrote:
> We have two aging Netapp filers and can't afford to buy new Netapp gear,
> so we've been looking with a lot of interest at building NFS fileservers
> running ZFS as a possible future approach. Two issues have come up in the
> discussion
>
> - Adding new disks to a RAID-Z pool (Netapps handle adding new disks very
> nicely). Mirroring is an alternative, but when you're on a tight budget
> losing N/2 disk capacity is painful.
>
> - The default scheme of one filesystem per user runs into problems with
> linux NFS clients; on one linux system, with 1300 logins, we already have
> to do symlinks with amd because linux systems can't mount more than about
> 255 filesystems at once. We can of course just have one filesystem
> exported, and make /home/student a subdirectory of that, but then we run
> into problems with quotas -- and on an undergraduate fileserver, quotas
> aren't optional!
>
> Neither of these problems are necessarily showstoppers, but both make the
> transition more difficult. Any progress that could be made with them
> would help sites like us make the switch sooner.
The showstopper might be performance - since the Netapp has nonvolatile
memory - which greatly accelerates NFS operations. A good strategy is to
build a ZFS test system and determine if it provides the NFS performance
you expect in your environment. Remember that ZFS "likes" inexpensive
SATA disk drives - so a test system will be kind to your budget and the
hardware is re-usable when you decide to deploy ZFS. And you may very
well find other, unintended uses for that "test" system.
Regards,
Al Hopper Logical Approach Inc, Plano, TX. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Voice: 972.379.2133 Fax: 972.379.2134 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris.Org Community Advisory Board (CAB) Member - Apr 2005
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Feb 2006
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