Doh sorry about that, the threading got very confused on my mail reader!
Bye, Deano From: Phil Harman [mailto:phil.har...@gmail.com] Sent: 21 December 2010 13:12 To: Deano Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] A few questions On 21/12/2010 13:05, Deano wrote: On Dec 20, 2010, at 7:31 AM, Phil Harman <phil.har...@gmail.com> wrote: > If you only have a few slow drives, you don't have performance. > Like trying to win the Indianapolis 500 with a tricycle... Actually, I didn't say that, Richard did :) Well you can put a jet engine on a tricycle and perhaps win it… Or you can change the race course to only allow a tricycle space to move. In the context of storage we have 2 factors hardware and software, having faster and more reliable spindles is no reason to suggest that better software can’t be used to beat it. The simple example is ZIL SSD, where using some software and even a cheap commodity SSD will outperform sync writes than any amount of expensive spindle drives. Before ZIL software is was easy to argue that the only way of speeding up writes was more faster spindles. The question therefore is, is there room in the software implementation to achieve performance and reliability numbers similar to expensive drives whilst using relative cheap drives? ZFS is good but IMHO easy to see how it can be improved to better meet this situation, I can’t currently say when this line of thinking and code will move from research to production level use (tho I have a pretty good idea ;) ) but I wouldn’t bet on the status quo lasting much longer. In some ways the removal of OpenSolaris may actually be a good thing, as its catalyized a number of developers from the view that zfs is Oracle led, to thinking “what can we do with zfs code as a base”? Ffor example how about sticking a cheap 80GiB commodity SSD in the storage case. When a resilver or defrag is required, use it as a scratch space to give you a block of fast IOPs storage space to accelerate the slow parts. When its done secure erase and power it down, ready for the next time a resilver needs to happen. The hardware is available, just needs someone to write the software… Bye, Deano _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
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