On Fri, 2007-01-26 at 06:16 -0800, Jeffery Malloch wrote: > Hi Folks, > > I am currently in the midst of setting up a completely new file server using > a pretty well loaded Sun T2000 (8x1GHz, 16GB RAM) connected to an Engenio > 6994 product (I work for LSI Logic so Engenio is a no brainer). I have > configured a couple of zpools from Volume groups on the Engenio box - 1x2.5TB > and 1x3.75TB. I then created sub zfs systems below that and set quotas and > sharenfs'd them so that it appears that these "file systems" are dynamically > shrinkable and growable. It looks very good... I can see the correct file > system sizes on all types of machines (Linux 32/64bit and of course Solaris > boxes) and if I resize the quota it's picked up in NFS right away. But I > would be the first in our organization to use this in an enterprise system so > I definitely have some concerns that I'm hoping someone here can address. > > 1. How stable is ZFS? The Engenio box is completely configured for RAID5 > with hot spares
That partly defeats the purpose of ZFS. ZFS offers raid-z and raid-z2 (double parity) with all the advantages of raid-5 or raid-6 but without several of the raid-5 issues. It also has features that a raid-5 controller could never do: ensure data integrity from the kernel to the disk, and self correction. > and write cache (8GB) has battery backup so I'm not too concerned from a > hardware side. Whereas the cache/battery backup is a requirement if you run raid-5, it is not for zfs. > I'm looking for an idea of how stable ZFS itself is in terms of > corruptability, uptime and OS stability. Since Solaris 10 U3, it is rock solid. No issue here. 1.3TB or so currently assigned in FC drives, in production without any issues. We switched after losing some data from hardware mirroring. Our sysadmin is ecstatic with zfs. Some of the filesystems have compression enabled and that increases even the throughput, if you have the cpu/ram available. > 2. Recommended config. The most reliable setup is a JBOD + zfs. But if you have cache, on your box, there might be some magic setup you have to do for that box, and I'm sure somebody on the list will help you with that. I dont have an Engenio. Francois _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
