On Dec 17, 2006, at 6:57 PM, Al Hopper wrote:

On Sun, 17 Dec 2006, Ricardo Correia wrote:

On Friday 15 December 2006 20:02, Dave Burleson wrote:
Does anyone have a document that describes ZFS in a pure
SAN environment?  What will and will not work?

 From some of the information I have been gathering
it doesn't appear that ZFS was intended to operate
in a SAN environment.

This might answer your question:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/faq/#hardwareraid

The section entitled "Does ZFS work with SAN-attached devices?" does not
make it clear the (some would say) dire effects of not having pool
redundancy. I think that FAQ should clearly spell out the downside; i.e.,
where ZFS will "say" (Sorry Charlie) "pool is corrupt".

A FAQ should always emphasize the real-world downsides to poor decisions
made by the reader.   Not delivering "bad news" does the reader a
dis-service IMHO.

Regards,

Al Hopper  Logical Approach Inc, Plano, TX.  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
           Voice: 972.379.2133 Fax: 972.379.2134  Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris.Org Community Advisory Board (CAB) Member - Apr 2005
             OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Feb 2006
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Hmmm... A question. Are you referring to not using redundancy within the array, or not using a redundant pool configuration?

In the case of the former, I completely agree.

In the case of the latter using intelligent arrays, I don't see how the a 'pool corrupt' problem differs from any non-zfs solution today. If you're using RAID-5 LUNs along with UFS/VxFS/SVM with no mirroring, you're in the same situation; corruption within the array will require a data restore.

Personally, I think data that requires more than RAID-5 redundancy should be mirrored between discrete storage arrays. This configuration allows ZFS to mirror the data, while using RAID-5 (or better) within the controllers for best performance.

This solution isn't cheap, however. The justification for a dual- array solution really depends on the data value.

-----
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