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

Bill McGonigle bill at bfccomputing.com
Wed Nov 25 01:25:24 EST 2009


On 11/24/2009 05:36 PM, Alan Johnson wrote:

> Nice!  Ok, so you get the multi-level, compression, encryption, error
> checking, and RAIDZs?  Anything else significant I am forgetting?

coming soon to a ZFS near you: block-level de-duplication.  If a block
with the same SHA-256 exists on disk it gets pointer counted (optional,
there's a chance of collisions before the heat death of the universe -
there's also a verify mode for the truly paranoid).

> Can ZFS take an iSCSI block device as a pool member?  (Did I use pool
> right there?  Like and LVM volume group, right?)

yes, right, the iSCSI target would be a vdev in the pool.

>  If so, risk of
> infinite recursion asside, that could be a very powerful way to leverage
> a local FusionIO device to buffer an iSCSI storage cloud/SAN.

Sure, and ZFS knows what to do with faster drives (it uses them to cache
stuff from slower drives automagically - well once you tell it to do so).

-Bill

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