Hi Chris, I would have thought that managing multiple pools (you mentioned 200) would be an absolute administrative nightmare. If you give more details about your storage needs like number of users, space required etc it might become clearer what you're thinking of setting up.
Also, I see you were considering 200 pools on a single server. Considering that you'll want redundancy in each pool, if you're forming your pools from complete physical disks, you are looking at 400 disks minimum if you use a simple 2-disk mirror for each pool. I think it's not recommended t use partial disk slices to form pools -- use whole disks. I'll be bold here and make some assumptions. You have a lot of students/staff there and you have a need, say, for 10TB of data. You could create one pool, using sixteen 1TB disks. The pool could be formed as two RAIDZ2 vdevs, each vdev containing five disks for data and two for parity. Additionally, for extra safety, you could add two hot spares. Something like: zpool create unipool RAIDZ2 disk1 disk2 disk3 disk4 disk5 disk6 disk7 RAIDZ2 disk8 disk9 disk10 disk11 disk12 disk13 disk14 spare disk15 disk16 This arrangement would give 10TB of double-parity redundant data, meaning that it would survive 2 disks failing within each vdev (there's 2 of them), and when a disk or two fail from a vdev, spares would be used. Sun's X4500 can house 48 disks for around 24TB of storage if you need more capacity. Then, according to your needs, you could create multiple filesystems, using different mountpoints and access permissions of your choosing. Using the approach of one pool and multiple filesystems avoids the problems associated with one pool getting full whilst other pools being under-used. The pool will provide capacity across all the filesystems. You will also want to consider using snapshots to help avoid data loss, and these can be used very elegantly to perform incremental backups to another large capacity backup server on your network -- see zfs send / recv with the -i option, for example. I'm not an expert with ZFS yet, so I hope that others correct any mistakes I may have made here. The above is just based on my current limited experience and knowledge of ZFS :) Anyway, hope it helps. Simon http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/ This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
