Hi,
I just got ZFS boot up and running on my laptop. This being a major milestone
in the history of ZFS, I thought I'd reflect a bit on what ZFS brought to my
life so far:
- I'm using ZFS at home and on my laptop since January 2006 for mission
critical purposes:
- Backups of my wife's and my own Macs.
- Storing family photos (I have a baby now, so they _are_ mission critical
:) ).
- Storing my ca. 400 CDs that were carefully ripped and metadata'ed, which
took a lot of work.
- Providing fast and reliable storage for my PVR.
- And of course all the rough stuff that happens to laptops on the road.
- ZFS has already saved me from bit rot once. I could see that it fixed a bad
block during a weekly scrub. What a great feeling to know that your data is
much safer than it was before and to be able to see how and when it is being
protected!
It is kinda weird to talk to customers about adopting ZFS while knowing that
my family pictures at home are probably stored safer than their company
data...
- ZFS enabled me to just take a bunch of differently sized drives that have
been lying around somewhere and turn them into an easy to manage,
consistent and redundant pool of storage that effortlessly handles very
diverse workloads (File server, audio streaming, video streaming).
- During the frequent migrations (Couldn't make up my mind first on how to
slice and dice my 4 disks), zfs send/receive has been my best friend. It
enabled me to painlessly migrate whole filesystems between pools in
minutes.
I'm now writing a script to further automate recursive and updating
zfs send/receive orgies for backups and other purposes.
- Disk storage is cheap, and thanks to ZFS it became reliable at zero cost.
Therefore, I can snapshot a lot, not think about whether to delete stuff
or not, or simply delete stuff I don't need know, while knowing it is
still preserved in my snapshots.
- As a result of all of this, I learned a great deal about Solaris 10 and
it's other features, which is a big help in my day-to-day job.
I know there's still a lot to do and that we're still working on some bugs,
but I can safely say that ZFS is the best thing that happened to my data
so far.
So here's a big
THANK YOU!
to the ZFS team for making all of this and more possible for my little home
system.
Down the road, I've now migrated my pools to external mirrored USB disks
(mirrored because it's fast and lowers complexity; USB, because it's
pluggable and host-independent) and I'm thinking of how to backup them
(I realize I still need a backup) onto other external disks or preferably
another system. Again, zfs send/receive will be my friend here.
ZFS boot on my home server is the other next big thing, enabling me to
mirror my root file system more reliably than SVM can while saving space
for live upgrade and enabling other cool stuff.
I'm also thinking of using iSCSI zvols as Mac OS X storage for audio/video
editing and whole-disk backups, but that requires some waiting until
the Mac OS X iSCSI support has matured a bit.
And then I can start to really archive stuff: Older backups that sit on CDs
and are threatened by CD-rot, old photo CDs that have been sitting there and
hopefully haven't begun to rot yet, maybe scan in some older photos,
migrating my CD collection to a lossless format, etc.
This sounds like I've been drinking too much koolaid, and I've probably have,
but I guess all the above points remain valid even if I didn't work for Sun.
So please take this email as being written by a private ZFS user and not
a Sun employee.
So, again, thank you so much ZFS team and keep up the good work!
Best regards,
Constantin
--
Constantin Gonzalez Sun Microsystems GmbH, Germany
Platform Technology Group, Global Systems Engineering http://www.sun.de/
Tel.: +49 89/4 60 08-25 91 http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/
Sitz d. Ges.: Sun Microsystems GmbH, Sonnenallee 1, 85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten
Amtsgericht Muenchen: HRB 161028
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Marcel Schneider, Wolfgang Engels, Dr. Roland Boemer
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates: Martin Haering
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