> > I know you can get snapshotting from sun, but can you do > > dualparity or expand on the fly? > > Absolutely. ZFS. That is what we are moving everything to.
The first one, snapshotting, I am fully convinced, is awesomely supported in solaris with ZFS. The second one, what I'm referring to as "dualparity" is the ability to sustain 2 simultaneous disk failures without data loss. This is a function of the hardware raid controller, and not the filesystem. Am I making any bad assumptions here? I am not aware of any hardware raid controllers that can safely lose two disks at the same time, except the netapp/storevault/other enterprise filers. What I'm saying is, it's not supported like this on a sun xstore solaris zfs machine. Right? What I'm referring to as "volume expansion on the fly" is the ability to incrementally add disks, without degradation of redundancy or downtime. If I've got 6 disks in a dualparity configuration, controlled by hardware DP raid (usable capacity of 4 disks assuming no hotspare), I just slap in one more disk, and increase the size of my FS by 25%. No downtime, no degradation of redundancy. Perhaps the system runs slow for a couple hours. This too is not supported in the sun xstore solaris zfs configuration, right? > Try some xstore's with Solaris 10 + ZFS (x86 of course), we buy > large batches of SAS 1TB spindles for around $280 and build them > ourselves. ZFS is also now available on FreeBSD, Linux, and even Mac > OSX > if you have an aversion to Solaris As it happens, I have no aversion to solaris. It's pretty darn good. And since I learned ZFS supports this snapshotting, I've been browsing around and looking at ZFS all around. I don't think it's fair to say it's supported in OSX. In OSX, you cannot format and create a ZFS filesystem, and you can only mount it read-only. Although read/write variations exist, they are very immature at best. Same is true for Linux. Although it's open source, it can't be compiled in the linux kernel any time soon. Because it's written under CDDL, which conflicts with GPL. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Platforms _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
