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On 18.03.2010 17:49, erik.ableson wrote:
> Conceptually, think of a ZFS system as a SAN Box with built-in asynchronous
> replication (free!) with block-level granularity. Then look at your other
> backup requirements and attach whatever is required to the top of the stack.
> Remembering that everyone's requirements can be wildly or subtly different so
> doing it differently is just adapting to the environment. e.g. - I use ZFS
> systems at home and work and the tools and scale are wildly different and
> therefor so are the backup strategies – but that's mostly a budget issue at
> home... :-)
I'll answer this with some perspective from my own usage, so bear with
me if my setup isn't exactly enterprise-grade.
Which is exactly what I'm considering it. Basically a semi-intelligent
box that has a lot of disks, and an attached tape autoloader for dumping
"then entire box died!" data to. In my case the zvols contains vmfs (one
vmfs per vm, actually), so to the just-died you can add "and brought the
rest of the network down with it". A typical one-man setup with as cheap
a budget as possible. And as I've posted some weeks ago, I've ... had to
test the restore bit. Having a "hit f8 during boot, and boot directly
off the tape" I can live without (using a bootcd instead). But missing
the "I've now started restore, it'll manage itself and switch tapes when
necessary" isn't something I really want to miss out on. For the record,
restore in my case takes appx 12 hours fully automated and managing a
good 60MB/Sec all the way.
Now, I'm willing to miss out on some of the fun, and add an extra server
for simply handling the iSCSI bit, and then set up that to dump itself
onto the Windows-server (who has the backup). That's a NOK12K investment
(I've checked) with an option for becoming NOK16K if I need more than 2
1000BaseT's bundled (if two isn't enough, adding another four sounds
about right). The main storage box has an LSI 8308elp with 8 1T5 7200rpm
barracudas in RAID50 with coldspares, and it's ... near enough my bed to
hear the alarm should a disk die on me. So strictly speaking I don't
need ZFS featurewise (the 8308 has patrol reads/scrubbing, and it pushes
sufficient IO speeds to outperform the four NICS in the box). So
probably for my needs QFS/SAM would've been a better solution. I really
don't know, since the available installer for QFS/SAM only plays nice
with <Solaris10u8 and the four Marvell 88E8056 NICs on the mainboard
only has dladm aggregate capable support in the YGE driver (not the
yukonx legacy driver from Marvells site). Maybe someone knowing what
details of the QFS/SAM was opened up could answer me if that would work
at all for my needs. ;)
For day-to-day things snapshots perform admirably. Most of the bulk
storage isn't the iSCSI zvols, but SMB/CIFS shares containing mostly
.nef files. And all of those files are irreplacable. Not having a tape
backup of them is simply not an option. It's a hobbyist setup for
someone who ... used to be in the IT/Telco business, ended up on
disability pension for his troubles, and is trying to climb out of that
pension by starting over as a photographer. So backup software costing
me more than my total living budget for 6 months isn't likely to be a
viable solution for the problem either.
However, still looking from my own stance, there are several people
still in the business who consult with me on solutions on a much larger
scale than mine, and with a budget that'd make my eyes water. I'd really
like to point them towards (Open)Solaris, but without having personally
seen (Open)Solaris actually do the job I'm advertising it for, that
recommendation starts sounding increasingly hollow even to me. I suspect
a lot of such oneman-shops are (often less than more officially)
consulted for larger shops (old hand experience from the business counts
as something), and thus having a setup "that works" could (by Oracle) be
considered a good advertisement. If one-man-shops happen to be in the
situation that they really don't see the need for considering
alternatives because (Open)Solaris "just plain works", then the
signal:noise ratio between people recommending (Open)Solaris and those
speaking about other things gets tweaked in (Open)Solaris'es favor.
//Svein
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