ZFS Quickie
For quite a while now I have wanted to get involved with both Solaris and ZFS, but never seemed to find the time. A close friend and coworker of mine has decided to build a file server and has started to use OpenSolaris and ZFS, which has increased my interest in ZFS.
In some ways I wish I had considered ZFS more when I was building my file server. I wanted a 12 drive card so I was limited in my choices and might not have found a 12 port card supported by Solaris. Also not knowing Solaris I was unsure about having all of my files on a file system that only Solaris based distros can support reliably. If ZFS didn’t work out I would have to move back to Linux, and that would be hard with as much data as I was storing.
The thing that is a real bummer is that I am now finding myself needing to expand the array and wanting to slim the setup a little bit. What I mean by that is that I want to fill the card so that I am maxed out at the 12 drives, I want to buy the battery for the RAID card and I want to turn off journaling and just go with ext2. So in the end I am really having to reevaluate how I want my file server to be.
The other option, if I can get the card to work with Solaris/OpenSolaris is ditching the hardware raid funtionality of the card and setup ZFS instead. Right now, after tuning, I am only getting abut 350mb/s according to hdparm. With each drive by itself getting 109mb/s on average, 8 of them should be a bit higher than 350. I feel that having the card handle a lot of things is causing this problem and bypassing that might speed things up. Again this is all banking on if I can get Solaris to run with that card, which I don’t think is going to happen. I am going to research some cards again and see what 12 port non-raid cards are available, but I don’t think I want to spend all that money again.
You can’t beat this though:
zpool create raid2z c0t1d0 c0t2d0 c0t3d0 c0t4d0 c0t5d0 c0t6d0 c0t7d0 c0t8d0
That just bound all 8 disks in RAID6 and created the file system. No more fdisk and format and mkfs.ext3, etc. Simply beautiful!
