Hi All, I have been watching this thread for a while and thought it was time a chipped my 2 cents worth in. I have been an aggressive adopter of ZFS here across all of our Solaris systems and have found the benefits have far outweighed any small issues that have arisen.
Currently I have many systems that have LUNs provided from SAN based storage to systems for zpools. All our systems are configured with mirrored vdevs and the reliability factor has been as good as, if not greater than UFS and LVM. My rules of thumb around systems tend to stem around getting the storage infrastructure right as that generally leads to the best availability. To this end for every single SAN attached system we have dual paths to separate switches, every array has dual controllers dual pathed to different switches. ZFS may be more or less susceptible to any physical infrastructure problem, but in my experience it is on a par with UFS (and I gave up shelling out for vxfs long ago) The reasons for the above configuration is that our storage is evenly split between two sites dark fibre between them across redundant routes. This forms a ring configuration which is around 5 km around. We have so much storage that we need to have this in case of a data center catastrophe. The business recognizes the time to recovery risk would be so great that if we didn't we would be out of business in the event of one of our data centres burning or other natural disaster. I have seen other people discussing power availability on other threads recently. If you want it, you can have it. You just need the business case for it. I don't buy the comments on UPS unreliability. Quite frequently I have rebooted arrays and removed them from mirrored vdevs and have not had any issues with the LUNS they provided reattaching and re silvering. Scrubs on the pools have always been successful. Largest single mirrored pool is around 11TB which is form two 6140 RAID 5's. We also use Loki boxes as well for very large storage pools which are routinely filled. (I was a beta tester for Loki). I have two J4500's, one with 48 x 250 GB and 1 x with 48 x 1 TB drives. No issues there either. The 48 x 1 TB is used in a a Disk _> Disk - Tape config with a SL500 to back up our entire site. It is routinely fulled to the brim and it performs admirably attached to a T5220 which is 10 gig attached. All of the systems I have mentioned vary from Samba servers to compliance archives to Oracle DB servers, Blackboard content stores, squid web caches, LDAP directory servers, Mail stores, Mail spools., Calendar servers DB's. The list covers 60 plus systems. I have 0% Solaris older than Solaris 10. Why would you? In short I hope people don't hold back from adoption of ZFS because they are unsure about it. Judge for yourself as I have done and dip your toes in at whatever rate you are happy to do so. Thats what I did. /Scott. I also use it at home too with and old D1000 attached to a v120 with 8 x 320 GB scsi's in a RAIDZ2 for all our home data and home business (which is a printing outfit which creates a lot of very big files on our macs). -- _______________________________________________________________________ Scott Lawson Systems Architect Manukau Institute of Technology Information Communication Technology Services Private Bag 94006 Manukau City Auckland New Zealand Phone : +64 09 968 7611 Fax : +64 09 968 7641 Mobile : +64 27 568 7611 mailto:sc...@manukau.ac.nz http://www.manukau.ac.nz ________________________________________________________________________ perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);' ________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
