Warren Young wrote:
On 1/6/2010 2:35 PM, Boris Epstein wrote:
we are trying to set up some storage servers to run under Linux
You should also consider FreeBSD 8.0, which has the newest version of ZFS up and running stably on it. I use Linux for most server tasks, but for big storage, Linux just doesn't have anything like this yet.
http://security.freebsd.org/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-10:03.zfs.asc
Nothing really big but it does kinda leave doubts...interesting that FreeBSD has absorbed pf and zfs and now claims to be twice as fast as Linux for mysql/postgresql workloads. Certainly sounds very different from the FreeBSD 4.4 that I knew.
FreeBSD may now have ZFS support but it does not look quite the same as it does on Solaris/OpenSolaris.
I'm not recommending OpenSolaris on purpose. For the last few years, it was the only stable production-quality implementation of ZFS, but with FreeBSD 8.0, it just lost that advantage. I think, as a Linux fan, you will be happier with FreeBSD than OpenSolaris.
Serious system administrators are not Linux fans I don't think. I tend to want to use the right tool for the job like OpenBSD for firewalling for example. I don't know about you but I find pkg on OpenSolaris to be more akin to yum or apt than ports and then there is always nexenta if I really want a complete GNU userland and apt/dpkg. I could not find out much are ZFS on FreeBSD. Its man page is just a copy of the Solaris one. Does it support direct sharing/exporting as nfs/cifs/iscsi like it does on Solaris/OpenSolaris? Does it support using ZFS for booting and boot environments and a related upgrade system?
Nice that FreeBSD has improved its zfs support, I remember one person dissing zfs and pointing to vinum as an alternative but then maybe he did not know what he was talking about. However, there certainly is a lot more on vinum than there is on zfs in the FreeBSD manual.
storage volume would be in the range specified: 8-15 TB.
That puts you right on the edge of workability with 32-bit hardware. ext3's limit on 32-bit is 8 TB, and you can push it to 16 TB by switching to XFS or JFS. Best to use 64-bit hardware if you can.
Probably XFS if you want data guarantees on anything that is not a hardware raid card with bbu cache since JFS does not support barriers yet.