Right on the money there Bob. Without knowing more detail about the
clients workload, it would be hard to
advise either way. I would imagine based purely on the small amount of
info around the clients apps and
workload that NFS would most likely be the appropriate solution on top
of ZFS. You will make more efficient
use of the your ZFS storage this way and provide all the niceties like
snapshots and rollbacks from the Solaris
based filer whilst still maintaining Linux front ends.
Do take heed to the various list posts around ZFS/NFS with certain types
of workloads however.
Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Stephen Nelson-Smith wrote:
The interesting alternative is to set up Comstar on SXCE, create
zpools and volumes, and make these available either over a fibre
infrastructure, or iSCSI. I'm quite excited by this as a solution,
but I'm not sure if it's really production ready.
While this is indeed exciting, the solutions you have proposed vary
considerably in the type of functionality they offer. Comstar and
iSCSI provide access to a storage "volume" similar to SAN storage.
This volume is then formatted with some alien filesystem which is
unlikely to support the robust features of ZFS. Even though the
storage volume is implemented in robust ZFS, the client still has the
ability to scramble its own filesystem. ZFS snapshots can help defend
against that by allowing to rewind the entire content of the storage
"volume" to a former point in time.
With the NFS/CIFS server model, only ZFS is used. There is no
dependence on a client filesystem.
With the Comstar/iSCSI approach, you are balkanizing
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkanization) your storage so that each
client owns its own filesystems without ability to share the data
unless the client does it. With the native ZFS server approach, all
clients share the pool storage and can share files on the server if
the server allows it. A drawback of the native ZFS server approach is
that the server needs to know about the users on the clients in order
to support access control.
Regardless, there are cases where Comstar/iSCSI makes the most sense,
or the ZFS fileserver makes the most sense.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us,
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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_______________________________________________________________________
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
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