Paul B. Henson wrote: > We have been evaluating ZFS as a potential solution for delivering > enterprise file services for our campus. I've posted a couple of times with > various questions, but to recap we want to provide file space to our > approximately 22000 students and 2400 faculty/staff, as well as group > project space for about 1000 groups. Access will be via secure NFSv4 for > our UNIX systems, and CIFS via samba for our windows/macosx clients (the > in-kernel SMB server is not currently an option as we require official > support). >
N.B. anyone can purchase a Production Subscription for OpenSolaris which would get both "support" and the in-kernel CIFS server. http://www.sun.com/service/opensolaris/index.jsp <sidebar> At USC, we have a deal with Google whereby we use Google apps and gmail, so if you send e-mail to me @usc.edu, then I get it as a gmail service. The interesting bit is that it uses USC's single sign on infrastructure, not Google's. </sidebar> > We have almost completed a functional prototype (we're just waiting for an > IDR for ACL inheritance so we can complete testing), and are currently > considering deploying x4500 servers. We're thinking about 5, with > approximately 6000 ZFS filesystems each (Solaris 10U5 still has scalability > issues, any more than about 5-6 thousand filesystems results in > unacceptably long boot cycles). > > I was thinking about allocating 2 drives for the OS (SVM mirroring, pending > ZFS boot support), two hot spares, and allocating the other 44 drives as > mirror pairs into a single pool. While this will result in lower available > space than raidz, my understanding is that it should provide much better > performance. Is there anything potentially problematic about this > configuration? Low-level disk performance analysis is not really my field, > I tend to live a bit higher up in the abstraction layer. I don't think > there would be any performance issues with this, but would much appreciate > commentary from the experts. > That is what I would do. > Has there been a final resolution on the x4500 I/O hanging issue? I think I > saw a thread the other day about an IDR that seems promising to fix it, if > we go this route hopefully that will be resolved before we go production. > > It seems like kind of a waste to allocate 1TB to the operating system, > would there be any issue in taking a slice of those boot disks and creating > a zfs mirror with them to add to the pool? > This is also what I would do. > I'm planning on using snapshots for online backups, maintaining perhaps 10 > days worth. At 6000 filesystems, that would be 60000 snapshots floating > around, any potential scalability or performance issues with that? > I don't think we have much data for this size of a production system. OTOH, I would expect that only a small subset of the space will be active. > Any other suggestions or pointing out of potential problems would be > greatly appreciated. So far, ZFS looks like the best available solution > (even better if S10U6 comes out before we go production :) ), thanks to all > of the Sun guys for their great work on that... > > Long-term backup is more difficult. Is there an SLA, or do you need to treat faculty/staff different from undergrads or grad students? -- richard _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
