Software RAID issues (was Re: Suggestions solicited, server bring up)

Bill McGonigle bill at bfccomputing.com
Mon Nov 23 11:18:25 EST 2009


On 11/23/2009 10:31 AM, Alan Johnson wrote:
> Weeeee!  From all the theory I've read and watched, ZFS is the end
> game.  I'm still trying to figure out how to work it into cloud
> storage.  Does FreeNAS some how enable ZFS over iSCSI?  I can't wrap my
> mind around that, but the benefits of ZFS on the minimal overhead of
> iSCSI (vs. NFS) would be ideal, if impossible.

I know of a computer company over in Lebanon that's selling 16 and
24-bay Nexenta-based ZFS storage servers that'll do iscsi, nfs, smb with
impressive ease. ;)  OpenSolaris kernel, Ubuntu userland, block-level
dedup coming early next year.

NFS can do better than iSCSI with certain workloads (no block-sized
overheads) but it really gets interesting when pNFS shows up
(parallelism fixes the NFS throughput problem).  Q1'10, probably.

Unless Oracle changes the license (Sun dismissed it but Oracle is
already GPL'ing), ZFS probably gets superseded by btrfs, but not for a
few years.

-Bill

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Bill McGonigle, Owner
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