Hello, We have a StorageTek FLX280 (very similar to a 6140) with 16 750 GB SATA drives that we would like to use for disk-based backups. I am trying to make an (educated) guess at what the best configuration for the LUN's on the FLX280 might be.
I've read, or at least skimmed, most of the "ZFS Best Practices Guide" over at solarisinternals.com, which has some great information; however, I still do not feel like I have a good understanding of the interaction between ZFS and a disk array. More specifically, I am concerned about the number of IOP's that each drive and/or LUN will be able to handle. Seagate lists an average seek time of 9ms, and an average rotational latency of 4.16ms for these drives. By my math, each drive should be capable of 76 IOP's in a worst case scenario; i.e. completely random I/O. These drives support native command queuing, and the controllers on the FLX280 have a battery-backed cache, so I would _assume_ that they are also capable of reordering I/O op's to improve throughput to the disks. So, the question is whether or not worst-case IOP's are even relevant. If my assumptions about the controllers on the FLX280 are correct (documentation?), then it seems like we could use RAID-Z to get the throughput we're looking for. If not, we may have to go with RAID-1. Anyone have any thoughts on this? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
