Wee Yeh Tan wrote:
Hi all,
My company will be acquiring the Sun SE6920 for our storage
virtualization project and we intend to use quite a bit of ZFS as
well. The 2 technologies seems somewhat at odds since the 6920 means
layers of hardware abstraction but ZFS seems to prefer more direct
access to disk.
Not at odds. I would say overlapping in some areas and, in some cases
complimentary, but not at odds unless mis-configured.
First, ZFS prefers access to LUNs. In many cases it prefers access to
lots of LUNs for file system integrity as well as performance. The
composition of those LUNs can be just about anything as long as ZFS can
read and write blocks in a sane manner. Sure, the simpler the config the
better for overall manageability but in many cases storage
configurations increase in complexity as they increase in functionality.
Second, as you noted above the 6920 lets you, among other things,
virtualize the underlying storage. It lets you do this for multiple
hosts and OS at the block level. Today, ZFS is a Solaris 10 single host
filesystem. Placing ZFS on the LUNs exported from a 6920 to your Solaris
10 hosts is one option you should definitely look into. Unfortunately,
you might not be able to use it for all of the hosts you intend to hook
up to the 6920.
Third you need to look at the overall system configuration and
architecture when making storage decisions. Does it make sense to use
RaidZ on the host on top of a Raid1 volume from the 6920 that sits on a
Raid5 volume in the T3B you have in a rack across the room? Probably
not. (In fact it never does but I digress....) Does it make sense to use
a base RAID level within the 6920 that exports LUNs to all of your data
center? Perhaps with the assumption that you'll then you then use a
simple ZFS configuration on top of it for the hosts that run ZFS. Again,
it depends on the config and what your trying to accomplish overall as
well as the applications and host specifics.
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