On Fri, 15 May 2009, milosz wrote:
i have a heterogenous assortment of lower-end second-tier storage gear (aoe, poorly-performing iscsi, sas das) that i need to serve out to windows clients and it occurred to me that i could hook it all into a first-tier solaris app san and farm it out via zfs and comstar/iscsi. is anyone doing this already? what do people think of this in general in terms of caveats/feasibility/roi? single point of failure comes to mind, but it's all second-tier stuff.
If your front end server has quite a lot of (ECC!) RAM installed, then it will dramatically improve read performance for often-accessed files due to the positive influence of ZFS ARC caching. Async write performance will improve as well since writes can be buffered in RAM. If you can add a SSD to act as a write log device, then synchronous writes will be much faster as well.
The ZFS ARC caching and support for SSDs makes this a very performant solution. If you can install fiber channel cards, then the server can also act as a high performance FC SAN device.
The single point of failure is clearly the biggest concern, but if necessary you can maintain a standby server which is prepared to import the ZFS pools and resume service if the server hardware or OS install fails.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn [email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
