On Sep 29, 2010, at 17:49 , Harald Barth wrote: > Currently our AFS servers are on Linux and XFS. We were thinking of > moving to OpenSolaris or Solaris and ZFS. But as things are now, these > options either have a very unsecure future or a very hefty pricetag. > For us, the name change of the company did result in a doubling of > prices, something that we did not pay but took another solution. I am > still searching for a good software raid solution. Any experiences > with ZFS on FreeBSD out there? Other suggestions?
Well, how about hardware RAID? The only flavour I have recent first hand
experience with are the LSI Megaraid Controllers (or, more precisely, OEM
controllers based on them from our current main hardware vendor): They do
RAID-6 at reasonable speed, scrub the disks and check the parity according to
your needs, keep a log of drive problems and error counters independent of the
OS, come with a BBU option, and are reasonably cheap. They isolate you from
having to deal with SATA drives or baseboard chipsets. And they have a *stable*
management interface with a lean CLI for accessing it independent of vendors'
management suites.
While I had loved to see ZFS for Linux (and am still hoping for it, or for
btrfs becoming production grade), we have been quite happy with this solution
(and are now runnig ~ 1.5 PB of disk storage this way). We're using ext3 on top
for vicep partitions, but XFS is doing well on other (non-AFS) fileservers here
and we'd use it for AFS if it had serious advantages for our use case. IMO, XFS
is just slightly more adventouros.
Best regards,
Stephan
--
Stephan Wiesand
DESY -DV-
Platanenenallee 6
15738 Zeuthen, Germany
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