Larry Lui wrote: > Hello, > I have a situation here at the office I would like some advice on. > > I have 6 Sun Fire x4550(Thumper) that I want to aggregate the storage > and create a unified namespace for my client machines. My plan was to > export the zpools from each thumper as an iscsi target to a Solaris > machine and create a RAIDZ zpool from the iscsi targets. I think this > is what they call RAID plaiding(RAID on RAID). This Solaris frontend > machine would then share out this zpool via NFS or CIFS. >
What is your operating definition of "unified namespace." In my mind, I've been providing a unified namespace for 20+ years -- it is a process rather than a product. For example, here at Sun, no matter where I login, I get my home directory. > My question is what is the best solution for this? The question i'm > facing is how to add additional thumpers since you cannot expand a RAIDZ > array. > Don't think of a thumper as a whole disk. Then expanding a raidz2 (preferred) can be accomplished quite easily. For example, something like 6 thumpers, each providing N iSCSI volumes. You can add another thumper, move the data around and end up with 7 thumpers providing data -- online, no downtime. This will take a good long while to do because you are moving TBytes between thumpers, but it can be done. IMHO, there is some ugliness here. You might see if pNFS, QFS, or Lustre would better suit the requirements at the "unified namespace" level. -- richard _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
