I find this thread both interesting and disturbing. I'm fairly new to this list so please excuse me if my comments/opinions are simplistic or just incorrect.
I think there's been to much FC SAN bashing so let me change the example. What if you buy a 7000 Series server (complete with zfs) and setup an IP SAN. You create a LUN and share it out to a Solaris 10 host. On the solaris host you create a ZFS pool with that iscsi LUN. Now my undersatnding is that you will not be able to correct errors on the zpool of the Solaris10 machine because zfs on the solaris 10 machine is not doing the raid. Another example would be if you were sharing out a lun to a vmware server, from your iscsi san or fc san, and creating solaris 10 virtual machines, with zfs booting. Another example would be Solaris 10 booting a zfs filesystem from a hardware mirrored pair of drives. Now these are examples of standard implementations of machines in a datacenter, specifically ones I have installed. >From following this thread I now feel that if I have uncorrectable "data errors" on the zfs pools there will be no way to easily repair the pool. I see no reason that if I do detect errors as I scrub the zfs pool that I should be able to run a simple utility to fix the pools as I would a ufs filesystem and then recover the corrupted files from tape. I believe that for zfs to be used as a general purpose filesystem that there has to be support built into zfs to support these standard data center implementations, otherwise it will just become a specialized filesystem, like Netapp's WAFL, and there are alot more servers than storage appliances in the datacenter. I think this thread has put zfs in a negative light. I don't actually believe that I will experience many of these problems in an Enterprise class data center, but still I don't look forward to having to deal with the consequences of encountering these types of problems. Maybe zfs is not ready to be considered a general purpose filesystem. -- Ed Spencer _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
