On 21/12/2010 13:05, Deano wrote:
On Dec 20, 2010, at 7:31 AM, Phil Harman <phil.har...@gmail.com
<mailto:phil.har...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> If you only have a few slow drives, you don't have performance.
> Like trying to win the Indianapolis 500 with a tricycle...
Actually, I didn't say that, Richard did :)
Well you can put a jet engine on a tricycle and perhaps win it… Or you
can change the race course to only allow a tricycle space to move. In
the context of storage we have 2 factors hardware and software, having
faster and more reliable spindles is no reason to suggest that better
software can’t be used to beat it. The simple example is ZIL SSD,
where using some software and even a cheap commodity SSD will
outperform sync writes than any amount of expensive spindle drives.
Before ZIL software is was easy to argue that the only way of speeding
up writes was more faster spindles.
The question therefore is, is there room in the software
implementation to achieve performance and reliability numbers similar
to expensive drives whilst using relative cheap drives?
ZFS is good but IMHO easy to see how it can be improved to better meet
this situation, I can’t currently say when this line of thinking and
code will move from research to production level use (tho I have a
pretty good idea ;) ) but I wouldn’t bet on the status quo lasting
much longer. In some ways the removal of OpenSolaris may actually be a
good thing, as its catalyized a number of developers from the view
that zfs is Oracle led, to thinking “what can we do with zfs code as a
base”?
Ffor example how about sticking a cheap 80GiB commodity SSD in the
storage case. When a resilver or defrag is required, use it as a
scratch space to give you a block of fast IOPs storage space to
accelerate the slow parts. When its done secure erase and power it
down, ready for the next time a resilver needs to happen. The hardware
is available, just needs someone to write the software…
Bye,
Deano
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