--- On Sun, 4/26/09, Ben Rockwood <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Ben Rockwood <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [storage-discuss] ZFS and deduplication
> To: "james whitby III" <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
> Date: Sunday, April 26, 2009, 3:49 PM
> james whitby III wrote:
> > To rephrase that, we have TCP offload engines, why not
> ZFS offload engines?
> >
>
> We do! Its called Amber Road. :)
>
>
> Seriously, ZFS was designed with modern conventional
> hardware as its
> platform, as opposed to purpose built goodies. There is a
> vendor that
> specializes in hardware compression that has considered
> building a card
> to provide line-speed gzip compression, but thats extent of
> it.
>
> benr.
What actually brought it to mind for me is I, well basically am the IT
department for a small outfit, and one of our servers is an old PIII 500mhz
w/768MB of RAM. I originally installed Opensolaris on it to prove a point with
my employer, and honestly don't remember what that point was. It was slated to
be taken down and recycled afterward, but it's working so well, now I'm having
to prove why we need to upgrade the machine lol. (Yeah hardware is cheap, and
this thing is still kickin.) We have hit the point now that it will probably
needs be relagated to strictly a storage box, and then out the door not long
after...or maybe I'll strip it down and give crossbow a whirl.
For some idea of what it is used for: it provides about 100Gb of storage, DNS,
amanda backup, and a small LDAP directory. For good measure I added xVM and
put Fedora with LTSP (yes actually I am trying to break it). The LTSP is only
supporting 2 thin clients atm, but when you consider the vintage of the
machine, the performance is amazing. Bearing in mind this machine is HEAVILY
overloaded. (gee who would have thought lol) I recently enabled compression on
various filesystems within rpool. If it weren't for the 29160 handling the
drive I/O, I think that machine would have given up by now. It didnt make the
machine unusable but wasn't far from it either.
Scenarios like this are why I brought up the ZFS offload engine ^_^ although
I'm sure the card would cost more than what we currently use as a server
platform. We still use some now "ancient" hardware, and it runs extremely well
considering it's duties, but compression on the drive I think is going to be
the last dance for that machine. (We don't NEED compression yet, but it was
one of the final considerations in deciding that the machine is due to be
retired, compression was just to much. Once it's moved to strictly NAS duties,
I'll post again with some updates on performance.
One last thought. Rpool is mirrored, I'm not going to attempt a RAIDZ while
the machine is still in production use. It may work fine, but this isn't the
time to find out ^_^
--Butch
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