Al Hopper wrote: > On Fri, 26 Jan 2007, Rainer Heilke wrote: > >>> So, if I was an enterprise, I'd be willing to keep >>> enough empty LUNs >>> available to facilitate at least the migration of >>> one or more filesystems >>> if not complete pools. > > .... reformatted ... > >> You might be, but don't be surprised when the Financials folks laugh you >> out of their office. Large corporations do not make money by leaving >> wads of cash lying around, and that's exactly what a few terabytes of >> unused storage in a high-end SAN is. This is in addition to the laughter >> > > > But this is exactly where ZFS distrupts "Large corporations" thinking.
Yes and no. A corporation has a SAN for reasons that have been valid for years; you won't turn that ship around on a skating rink. > You're talking about (for example) 2 terabytes on a high-end SAN which > costs (what ?) per GB (including the capital cost of the hi-end SAN) > versus a dual Opteron box with 12 * 500Gb SATA disk drives that gives you > 5TB of storage for (in round numbers) a total of ~ $6k. And how much are > your ongoing monthlies on that hi-end SAN box? (Don't answer) So - aside > from the occasional use of the box for data migration, this ZFS "storage > box" has 1,001 other uses. Pick any two (uses), based on your knowledge > of big corporation thinking and its an easy sell to management. > > Now your accounting folks are going to be asking you to justify the > purchase of that hi-end SAN box.... and why you're not using ZFS > everywhere. :) No, they're going to be asking me why I want to run a $400K server holding all of our inventory and financials data on a cheap piece of storage I picked up at Pa's Pizza Parlor and Computer Parts. There are values (real and imagined, perhaps) that a SAN offers. And, when the rest of the company is running on the SAN, why aren't you? As a side-note, if your company has a mainframe (yes, they still exist!), when will ZFS run on it? We'll need the SAN for a while, yet. >> generated by the comment that, "not a big deal if the Financials and HR >> databases are offline for three days while we do the migration." Good > Again - sounds like more "legacy" thinking. With multiple gigabit > ethernet connections you can move terrabytes of information in a hour, > instead of in 24-hours - using legacy tape systems etc. This can be > easily handled during scheduled downtime. If your company is graced with being able to cost-justify the rip-and-replace of the entire 100Mb network, more power to you. Someone has to pay for all of this, and good luck fobbing it all of on some client. >> Sorry, this argument smacks a little too much of being out of touch with >> the fiscal (and time) restrictions of working in a typical corporation, >> as opposed to a well-funded research group. >> >> I hope I'm not sounding rude, but those of us working in medium to large >> corporations simply do not have the money for such luxuries. Period. > On the contrary - if you're not thinking ZFS, you're wasting a ton of IT > $s and hurting the competitiveness of your business. But you can't write off the investment of the old gear in six months and move on. I wish life worked like that, but it doesn't. At least, not where I work. :-( > Regards, > > Al Hopper Rainer This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
