[SGVLUG] Storage - NAS / SAN, ZFS - what's your experience with them?

[Scott Packard]

Try OpenIndiana for ZFS - several developers left Oracle and formed Illumos.
OpenIndiana is the follow-on for OpenSolaris, now that Oracle killed it.
Search youtube for Illumos, and you'll see Bryan Cantrill.

I'm pretty sure Nexenta is basing their stuff on OpenIndiana now,
and renamed theirs Illumian.
What do you get for free now - 18TB? I think?

I don't think ZFS is bad for small businesses, but I'm running into some
limitations with it where I work, on Solaris 10 older patches.

I've been diving into bringing up a NetApp from scratch, doing SAN, NAS,
Fibre Channel, Ethernet, high availability, and reporting, and many
things are much smoother on the NetApp than they are on Solaris.

As an aside, ZFS made more sense after reading a lot of the NetApp
documentation on storage.  I think you get access to the NetApp documentation
by just signing up for a free account.  The Oracle stuff really isn't accessible
until you have paid support, and it's not good documentation at all.  I hope
Illumos/OpenIndiana makes it better, and I think Nexenta puts a decent
management GUI on ZFS.
> http://www.zfsbuild.com/2010/09/10/freenas-vs-opensolaris-zfs-benchmarks/
I can see the difference between a zpool storage pool and a zfs dataset
confused them too.  It was always tripping me and my coworkers up too.
Reading and understanding NetApp's "aggregate" and "volume" helps
bring some sense to "zpool" and "zfs dataset".  It's a shame; because
zfs helps you just a little too much there when you create a zpool and
you are forever confused because of it.  With the NetApp, you create an
aggregate, but can't do anything with it until you create either a volume
or a LUN in it.  That's harder to get in the beginning, but easier to understand
later on.

As far as their lower performance with FreeNAS, a comment or two says
iSCSI isn't native in that version of FreeBSD.  Context switches do cost.
Maybe that was a choke-point.  I would run my own test/do more research.


Last, my wife's business went from a paper-based office to using DropBox
a year ago, and I'm impressed with DropBox.  They have their setup to
use one login for everyone;
everyone has access to everything.  LAN-based synchronization of files,
with DropBox servers getting deltas of changes to put into their cloud storage.

Regards, Scott

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 7:45 PM, matti <mathew_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> So I am looking at an affordable storage solution for a small business environment.
>
> Curious what others have experienced in this arena
>
> Digging about wondering what would be the best solution on
>
> a budget and noticed a few interesting references:
>
> freeNAS vs Open Solaris ZFS: ( this is from 2010.. so it maybe a bit
> dated.. freeNAS is based on FreeBSD and the newer versions should
> do better with ZFS,,also note they use iSCSI )
>
> http://www.zfsbuild.com/2010/09/10/freenas-vs-opensolaris-zfs-benchmarks/
>
> Hmm... Nexenta OS wonder how good that is...
>
> A few more references:
>
> http://www.stringliterals.com/?p=58
> http://www.stringliterals.com/?p=77
>
> http://www.zfsbuild.com/
>
> Open Storage Summit has a number of videos online
>
> http://www.youtube.com/user/OpenStorageSummit/videos
>
> thanks
> matti
>