As shipped, there our x4500 have 8 raidz pools with 6 disks each in them. If spaced right, you can loose 6(?) disks without the pool dying. The root disk is mirrored, so if one dies it's not the end of the world. With the exception that grub is thoroughly fraked up in that if the 0 disk dies, you have to manually make the darn thing boot. You can't hot swap CPU or memory, but you can swap drives, fans, network links, and power supplies.
With the rest of the hardware redundancy built in, they have been working pretty well for us here. We did have some issues with a failure of the machine (software related) but with a decent support contract, you should be ok. Our windows group purchased their BlueArc san and spent 100k for 15TB (raw)... I spent 50K for 33TB (useable)... David David Glaser Systems Administrator LSA Information Technology University of Michigan -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Solaris Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 4:09 PM To: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org Subject: [zfs-discuss] Strategies to avoid single point of failure w/ X45x0 Servers? I have been leading the charge in my IT department to evaluate the Sun Fire X45x0 as a commodity storage platform, in order to leverage capacity and cost against our current NAS solution which is backed by EMC Fiberchannel SAN. For our corporate environments, it would seem like a single machine would supply more than triple our current usable capacity on our NAS, and the cost is significantly less per GB. I am also working to prove the multi-protocol shared storage capabilities of the Thumper significantly out perform those of our current solution (which is notoriously bad from the end user perspective). The EMC solution is completely redundant with no single point of failure. What are some good strategies for providing a Thumper solution with no single point of failure? The storage folks are poo-poo'ing this concept because of the chances for an Operating System failure... I'd like to come up with some reasonable methods to put them in their place :) _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
