Richard Elling wrote:
On Aug 5, 2009, at 2:58 PM, Brian Kolaci wrote:
I'm chiming in late, but have a mission critical need of this as well
and posted as a non-member before. My customer was wondering when
this would make it into Solaris 10. Their complete adoption depends
on it.
I have a customer that is trying to move from VxVM/VxFS to ZFS,
however they have this same need. They want to save money and move to
ZFS. They are charged by a separate group for their SAN storage
needs. The business group storage needs grow and shrink over time, as
it has done for years. They've been on E25K's and other high power
boxes with VxVM/VxFS as their encapsulated root disk for over a
decade. They are/were a big Veritas shop. They rarely ever use UFS,
especially in production.
They absolutely require the shrink functionality to completely move
off VxVM/VxFS to ZFS, and we're talking $$millions. I think your
statements below are from a technology standpoint, not a business
standpoint.
If you look at it from Sun's business perspective, ZFS is $$ free, so
Sun gains
no $$ millions by replacing VxFS. Indeed, if the customer purchases VxFS
from Sun, it makes little sense for Sun to eliminate a revenue source.
OTOH,
I'm sure if they are willing to give Sun $$ millions, it can help raise the
priority of CR 4852783.
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=4852783
They're probably on the list already, but I'll check to make sure.
What I meant by the $$ millions is that currently all Sun hardware purchases are on hold. Deploying on
Solaris currently means not just the hardware, but the support, required certified third-party software
such as EMC powerpath, Veritas VxVM & VxFS, BMC monitoring, and more... Yes, I'm still working the
MPxIO to replace powerpath, but there's issues there too. They will not use UFS. Right now ZFS is OK
for limited deployment and no production use. Their case on ZFS is that its good for dealing with
JBOD, but it not yet "enterprise ready" for SAN use. Shrinking a volume is just one of a
list of requirements to move toward "enterprise ready", however many issues have been fixed.
So Sun would see increased hardware revenue stream if they would just listen to
the customer... Without it, they look for alternative hardware/software
vendors. While this is stalled, there have been several hundred systems that
have been flipped to competitors (and this is still going on). So lack of this
feature will cause $$ millions to be lost...
You say its poor planning, which is way off the mark. Business needs
change daily. It takes several weeks to provision SAN with all the
approvals, etc. and it it takes massive planning. That goes for
increasing as well as decreasing their storage needs.
I think you've identified the real business problem. A shrink feature in
ZFS will
do nothing to fix this. A business who's needs change faster than their
ability
to react has (as we say in business school) an unsustainable business
model.
-- richard
Yes, hence a federal bail-out. However a shrink feature will help them to be
able to spend more with Sun.
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