I've ploughed through the documentation, but it's kind of vague on some points and I need to buy some hardware if I'm to test it, so I thought I'd ask first. I'll begin by describing what I want to achieve, and would apreciate if someone could tell me if this is possible or how close I can come.
My current situation: I have a lot of data, currently som 10-12 TB spread over about 50 disks in five file servers, adding on the average a new disk every 1-2 months, and a new server every year or so. The old paradigm with volumes makes this a major pain in the rear end, as it becomes very difficult to organize data. The large volume also makes backups impractical, as I'm just an ordinary home user, so fancy tape robots and such are out of my price range. Most of my data is not compressable, and the size varies greatly, from large files (GB-sized) to huge numbers (millions) of tiny files (just a few kB). At the moment, all these are Windows servers, but I plan to switch to some Unix/Linux variant as soon as there is enough benefits (and ZFS sure looks like it could be the juicy bait in that trap). The clients (15 or so) are a mix of Linux, Windows and a bunch of Xboxes (as media players), with the Windows machines gradually being phased out and changed to Linux as fast as I can rewrite my own software (which I can't do without) for Linux. What I want: * The entire storage should be visible as one file system, with one logical file structure where volumes and servers are not even visible, as if it was one huge disk. No paths like /root/server1fs/volume1/dir... in other words. * Software RAID support, even across the network, so I can just add a bunch of parity disks and survive if a few disks crash. To me, it's well worth it to pony up with the money for 5-10 extra disks if I know that that many disks can fail before I start to lose data. That would be good enough to dispense with the need for proper backups. * A RAID that allows me to use differently sized disks without losing lots of disk space. I'm OK if some disk space is lost (ie a file is not striped over all disks, somewhat increasing the stripe size and thereby the size of the parity data), but I don't want to have my 400 GB disks only use the first 160 GB just because I have a shitload of 160 GB disks. * Performance does not need to be stellar, but should not be snail-like either. If it's enough to fill a 100 Mbit network cable, I'm perfectly happy, if it can't fill a 10 Mbit I'm starting to get worried. * A file system that handles huge numbers of tiny files somewhat effectively. Many file systems use a full block even for a tiny file, which cause huge overheads when there are many files. * Good interoperability with Linux, Windows and Xbox (actually, this is just a question of Samba compliance and as such out of scope for this discussion). Is this doable? If not, how close can I get and what is it that I can't get? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
