On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 3:42 PM, George Herbertgeorge.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 1:30 PM, William Allen Simpsonwilliam.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
2009/8/4 William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com:
If you have to buy now, and are unlikely to upgrade for years, the current gold plated performance version is Sun ZFS over NetApp filers.
Rilly? I thought they were comparable in performance but Sun was way cheaper (hence the patent kerfuffle).
No idea myself. I'm just passing along comments verbatim. I'm pretty sure "gold plated" means expensive. And I'm pretty sure NetApp wouldn't stay in business long for "comparable" performance. So, a whole bunch of somebodies out there think that NetApp performance exceeds others. YMMV.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the team needs to decide whether the 2 server, shared, pushme-pullyou variant, without Fiber Channel (or iSCSI or whatever), would perform well enough to meet current needs.
All the modern filesystems (WAFL, ZFS) have odd behavior and slowdowns as you approach full on the disk. I've got a bunch of multi-TB pools on Sun X4500s serving NFS and local storage, with ZFS, and have seen consistent stable performance if we keep them less than 70-80% full.
If you want more consistent behavior near the edges plus snapshots, you probably want to go buy Veritas / Symantec Foundation Suite - the Volume Manager gives you multi-disk RAID and snapshots, and the VxFS filesystem gives you growable and high-scale filesystems.
Another option for a shared file system with tiered storage (and multiple-copy archive ability) is Sun SAM/QFS. It also has the nicety of being open sourced recently.
Unfortunately, the open source version isn't ready for use. Also, native Linux support has always been kind of poor; however, you could always do SAM/QFS for tiered storage, and do pNFS (or NFSv4) for data access.
V/r,
Ryan Lane