23 Jun
2008
23 Jun
'08
6:54 a.m.
Via the grapevine...
http://advfs.sourceforge.net/
Doesn't mean a great deal to me, since I've never even seen a Tru64 box,
but thought it might be of interest to someone.....
23 Jun
23 Jun
7:17 a.m.
David Holland wrote:
Via the grapevine...
http://advfs.sourceforge.net/
Doesn't mean a great deal to me, since I've never even seen a Tru64 box,
but thought it might be of interest to someone.....
I've been drooling over Sun's "zfs" lately, which seems to have many of
the same features. But zfs is not gpl - worse, it appears to be
purposefully anti-gpl. Since Sun wrote it they can do as they please,
but it seems a shame to lock it out of linux (for me anyway).
I wonder how advfs and zfs compare in terms of stability and resource
use. Also, advfs does not mention the "self repairing" features of zfs
which make it so tempting for long term archiving (there, now i'm inside
the bounds :-) I do worry about long term corruption and zfs seems to
have that solved (i.e. a simple raid-1 setup will save you)
Word on the street is that zfs is *very* resource intensive and best run
in 64 bit kernels, but that when run the pool and self repairing features
make it very easy to administer.
I'd be curious to hear if anyone is using zfs for long term archival and
how they feel about being glued to solaris to use it. (aside: I used to
be a serious solaris weenie back in the day, so I'm a fan, but linux
just became so much more practical at some point)
-brad
10:01 a.m.
Brad Parker wrote:
I'd be curious to hear if anyone is using zfs for
long term archival and
how they feel about being glued to solaris to use it. (aside: I used to
be a serious solaris weenie back in the day, so I'm a fan, but linux
just became so much more practical at some point)
I have run Solaris at home for a few years now, and I'm also using ZFS.
I also run Linux on a different server for different tasks.
(OpenSolaris has recently (May 2008) become just as "practical" as Linux
(minus about 30% of the driver support Linux has) so you might want to
give the OpenSolaris LiveCD a chance.)
I am *definitely* using ZFS for long-term archival, as you can be as
paranoid as you like about hardware failures: raid-5, raid-6
(double-parity), redundant block copies on the same disk, on different
disks, etc. are all supported. The storage is expandable by replacing
hard drives one at a time (it is not as graceful as Veritas' "evacuate"
function, but they are working on it). Transparent light/realtime
compression or heavier/gzip compression on any filesystem if you want it
(great for email/text archives). Speed is the best I've seen on any
hardware (we use it at work too).
However, it is important to never keep all of your eggs in one basket;
to that end, I routinely archive to DVD. I used to archive to DLT but
the cost and speed became prohibitive once I could get a 16X DVD burner
for $30 and quality DVD-Rs for $0.22 a disc including shipping. I have
two DLT drives and it is still cheaper and faster to burn discs. (Note
that I didn't say easier -- the price for cheaper and faster is my
personal time, of course.)
I don't agree that you need 64-bit for ZFS. I do agree that you need a
minimum of 1G total system RAM for it, preferably 2G, since that helps
offload the cost of the parity/crc checks that keep data consistent and
ensure that you, the user, never actually *see* any IOs except reading.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
10:30 a.m.
Jim Leonard wrote:
...
(OpenSolaris has recently (May 2008) become just as
"practical" as Linux
(minus about 30% of the driver support Linux has) so you might want to
give the OpenSolaris LiveCD a chance.)
interesting. ok.
I am *definitely* using ZFS for long-term archival, as
you can be as
good to hear. Do you ever use the "snapshot" functionality for backups?
However, it is important to never keep all of your eggs
in one basket;
I think someone at Google said "keep 3 separate copies". That's what I
do. I actually make copies of my main scsi raid-1 to a spare local sata
raid-1 and then I make offsite tars of that (to Amazon S3).
I don't agree that you need 64-bit for ZFS. I do
agree that you need a
minimum of 1G total system RAM for it, preferably 2G, since that helps
offload the cost of the parity/crc checks that keep data consistent and
ensure that you, the user, never actually *see* any IOs except reading.
mmm. ok. memory is cheap.
One thing I always liked about Solaris was the rock solid SMP. Time for
a new look with zfs. I would think it would run well on the current class
of x86 cpu's.
thanks for the info!
-brad
24 Jun
24 Jun
8:50 a.m.
On Jun 23, 2008, at 1:30 PM, Brad Parker wrote:
One thing I always liked about Solaris was the rock
solid SMP.
Time for
a new look with zfs. I would think it would run well on the
current class
of x86 cpu's.
I encourage this. Linux is very "whiz-bang" and supports every
random PCI card on Earth, but Solaris 10 has some amazing
functionality these days (I make very heavy use of Zones here) and it
is absolutely indestructible. Especially on UltraSPARC hardware.
(multiple UltraSPARC-III+ CPUs) + (8MB cache per CPU) +
(FibreChannel disks)
== "happy dave" :-)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
8:38 a.m.
On Jun 23, 2008, at 10:17 AM, Brad Parker wrote:
I've been drooling over Sun's "zfs"
lately, which seems to have
many of
the same features. But zfs is not gpl - worse, it appears to be
purposefully anti-gpl. Since Sun wrote it they can do as they please,
but it seems a shame to lock it out of linux (for me anyway).
"Non-GPL" doesn't automatically mean "non-good", my friend. ;)
I
see no good reason why it shouldn't be made available for (but not
built into or distributed with) Linux.
Word on the street is that zfs is *very* resource
intensive and
best run
in 64 bit kernels, but that when run the pool and self repairing
features
make it very easy to administer.
In the context of Solaris, I run only SPARC hardware, which
implies 64 bits for current releases of Solaris. I haven't taken any
hard numbers, but file operations on ZFS do feel considerably faster
than those on UFS, on a very busy system. I'm not sure where the
(relative) bottleneck is with UFS, as this is just from observation,
not controlled scientific tests: moving my high-activity directories
(database filesystem, mail queues and spools) to ZFS made my systems
noticeably more responsive.
That said, though, I have no doubt that it's burning some CPU to
get that additional filesystem performance.
I'd be curious to hear if anyone is using zfs for
long term
archival and
how they feel about being glued to solaris to use it. (aside: I
used to
be a serious solaris weenie back in the day, so I'm a fan, but linux
just became so much more practical at some point)
I've been using it for day-to-day production for some time. I hit
some bugs in very early releases (no loss of data though), but they
were squashed pretty quickly.
I generally prefer hardware RAID, because I have better things for
my CPUs to be doing, but I am completely sold on ZFS. The ease of
management, the speed, and the corruption detection are all big deals
for me.
(and I must say, somewhat amusedly, that I run Solaris instead of
Linux because it's so much more practical! ;))
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
5989
days inactive
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5 comments
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brad＠heeltoe.com -
dholland＠woh.rr.com -
mcguire＠neurotica.com -
trixter＠oldskool.org