On Dec 18, 2006, at 16:13, Torrey McMahon wrote:
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.
I'd say that it's clearly described in the FAQ. If you push to
hard people will infer that SANs are broken if you use ZFS on top
of them or vice versa. The only bit that looks a little
questionable to my eyes is ...
Overall, ZFS functions as designed with SAN-attached devices,
but if
you expose simpler devices to ZFS, you can better leverage all
available features.
What are "simpler devices"? (I could take a guess ... )
stone tablets in a room full of monkeys with chisels?
The bottom line is ZFS wants to ultimately function as the controller
cache
and eventually eliminate the blind data algorithms that they
incorporate ..
the problem is that we can't really say that explicitly since we
sell, and much
of the enterprise operates with enterprise class arrays and
integrated data
cache. The trick is in balancing who does what since you've really got
duplicate Virtualization, RAID, and caching options open to you.
.je
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
