Actually the point is that there are situations that occur in which the typical software stack will make the wrong decision because it has no concept of the underlying hardware and no fault management structure that factors in more than just a single failed IO at a time...
Hardware RAID controllers are for the most part just an embedded system....the firmware is software...yes there might be a few ASICs or FPGAs to help out with XOR calculations, but most use CPUs that have XOR engines nowadays.... The difference is that the firmware is designed with intimate knowledge of how things are connected, silicon bugs, etc.... Running a solaris box with zfs to JBODS and exporting a file system to clients is approaching the same structure...with the exception that the solaris box is usually a general purpose box instead of an embedded controller.... Once you add a second solaris box and cluster them, you start rebuilding a redundant RAID array, but still would be lacking the level of fault handling that is put into the typical hardware array... I am sure this will be done at some point with the blade servers...it only makes sense... -Joel > You just made a great case for doing it in software. > > --Toby > _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
