THANK YOU VERY MUCH EVERYONE!! You have been very helpful and my questions are (mostly) resolved. While I am not (and probably will not become) a ZFS expert, I now at least feel confident that I can accomplish what I want to do.
My last comment on this is this: I realize that ZFS is designed and intended for Enterprise use, but it also has many useful features that home and soho users appreciate. That being said, I feel that it still will leave most casual home and soho users a bit confused and wishing for other features (especially ease of use). If Sun released a software alternative to the Drobo product, I feel certain that they would be able to very successfully market a product like this to home and soho users. Heck, I would buy such a piece of software (from Sun) in a hot second. Plus, if they based it off of ZFS and just "hid" most of the configuration options so that your pools were automatically configured with single parity (or mirror for 2 drive setups) -- then added the "expand-o-matic raidz" feature, add a "shrink" feature, and add the ability to better utilize space on differently sized drives -- it would be awesome, and a good part of the work would already be done (ie, ZFS). It would be far superior to Drobo, and could probably undercut Drobo significantly on price point. Then it would truly be the holy grail of file systems. In fact, depending on the license of OpenSolaris/ZFS, I wonder if a group of independent developers could package up Vbox, OpenSolaris, a modified ZFS, and a setup/admin utility to create such a product... that would be cool. Again, the "heavy lifting" would be modifying raidz so that it could expand/shrink/better utilize space on differently sized drives. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
