We’re needing to store many TBs of data (somewhere between 10TB and 50TB) on a SmartOS server (or cluster of SmartOS servers). Most of this data will be fairly static, and the files that will take up this space will typically average around 1MB in size. Performance isn’t going to be a huge concern, except that we’ll also house a database server where performance is a bit more important (although two 7200RPM drives in a mirrored zpool seem to be holding up currently just fine). We’ll be using zones for most virtual machines on this server.
We’re looking at getting a dedicated server with a 36 hard drive bay chassis to give us lots of room for growth. I’m envisioning we have two options: 1. Create one giant zpool that will eventually span up to ~32 hard drives and dump all the files in there. When using 4TB drives in RAID10, this would give us 32TB of usable storage. This would be the easiest solution because we could dump most of our data in a single filesystem. However, I’m concerned about scalability and reliability, as the wrong two hard drives going out at the same time would kill the entire zpool, and also dealing with a ~32TB filesystem may be challenging (we use zfs send/receive to replicate our data to an offsite mirror server, so at some point the diffs between snapshots will become huge as we collect more and more data; the initial full zfs send/receive would take forever, too). 2. We create one zpool for each group of 4 hard drives in RAID10 (with 4TB hard drives this would give us 8TB of usable space per zpool). This would require some forethought in our application as we’d have to split our data carefully to make sure it doesn’t exceed 8TB per filesystem, but this shouldn’t be a big deal. I’m leaning towards the second option. How would you recommend we setup the zpool(s) on this server? Are there other options I haven’t thought of that I should explore? Thanks, Alex ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
