On 03/19/11 12:17 AM, Toby Thain wrote: > On 18/03/11 5:56 PM, Paul B. Henson wrote: >> We've been running Solaris 10 for the past couple of years, primarily to >> leverage zfs to provide storage for about 40,000 faculty, staff, and >> students ... and at this point want to start reevaluating our best >> migration option to move forward from Solaris 10. >> >> There's really nothing else available that is comparable to zfs (perhaps >> btrfs someday in the indefinite future, but who knows when that day >> might come), so our options would appear to be Solaris 11 Express, >> Nexenta (either NexentaStor or NexentaCore), and OpenIndiana (FreeBSD is >> occasionally mentioned as a possibility, but I don't really see that as >> suitable for our enterprise needs). Questions are: Do you care of your OS being open and not tight to only one company, and do you care for software and packaging compatibility and do you need payed support or not and do you need it right now or in the future? Do you want to tie yourself with Oracle and closed Solaris products? (even if unofficially there were saying that they might open code after S11 release) If you used closed product before, that might be your enterprise upgrade path. Just prepare to cache Oracle out and that is it.
If you want to use free open source with ability to buy suport and all you want to use is zfs, then Nexenta is your way with their both free to use releases and commercially supported ones. Nexenta support development of Illumos that is future base of OpenIndiana, too. So Nexenta is something like what Sun previously was doing, they are actively developing it and you can have support for less money then from Oracle, I suppose. OpenIndiana is and will contiue to be closest you can get to Oracle Solaris releases. It shares software consolidations (and packaging, IPS,pkg) with closed brother. OpenIndiana has stable release in mind in near future, that might suit your needs. Dev OpenIndiana releases are (slowly) following path of OpenSolaris dev releases, so OpenIndiana can be right now Solaris 10 replacement (many people just continued to use OI dev) and in the future, with transition to Illumos base ahead in mind. I think that best thing you can do is to install OpenSolaris snv_134 (or 134b) and from that point you can see where you can go: To OpenIndiana dev and then follow Illumos development and wait for OpenIndiana stable , And try even closed Solaris Express 11. (with No zfs upgrade to Solaris Express version (!) - Be sure Not to do zfs and zpool upgrade to closed Solaris 11 express version, because you will be then locked-in in Oracle zfs versions.) I do not know how Nexenta could be installed in the same zpool in new BE but I suppose it can, since I know upgrading Nexenta use zfs BE's, too. That way, with multiple installs and sharing zfs between them, you are on safe ground of being able to test and choose to what will come in future and ,beside Oracle, there are at least 2 solutions now and in the future, that you can consider. I would personally like if one could buy support from Nexenta and continue to use OpenIndiana or Nexenta :) But Nexenta is more server-like and OpenIndiana is shooting to all-around solution. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
