Theo Van Dinter wrote: > On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 11:54 PM, Edward Ned Harvey > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> But if I simply buy a normal solaris server and turn on NFS and Samba ... >> Acknowledge that I'll do my admin on CLI instead of GUI ... which is >> presently working on some random blackbox PC test setup ... then I can do >> everything I can think of. My NFS and CIFS tests have been successful. >> "zfs send" is supported to transmit a snapshot from one system to another. >> I can think of a few features that are missing, such as parallel or >> distributed filesystem ... but I can't name anything that's super critical >> for a small business. >> > > If you're just talking about "for a small business", depending on what > that means of course, you're right, it probably doesn't really matter, > and the cost savings is probably more important than anything else. > > Once you get past a certain point though (be it amount of space, or > number of machines, or whatever your measurement of complexity is ...) > having a well engineered and dedicated storage appliance w/ a strong > (in my experience) support team is really the way to go, regardless of > the higher cost. > > > BTW: since you mentioned replication ... "zfs send | zfs recv" is very > rudimentary. It's basically a better version of "dump|restore". It's > not really directly comparable to something like Snapmirror. > > I think it's a bit better than you give it credit: * you can do full or incremental with respect to the original, and the receive side will keep the right ordering * send all incrementals snapshots between snapshotA and snapshotB * send an incremental stream from origin to create a clone on secondary see http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0547/ghgdx?l=de&a=view for more
so, on your secondary you can do things like: rollback to a different version keep more (consistent) sparse snapshots than exist on your primary if desired. this is way better than dump. For us, it's as good as snapmirror. The Fishworks takes this even further by tying it into consistent replication without having to care about which is primary and which is secondary or how to set it up. It adds a lot of speed improvements through cachezilla/readzilla and logzilla devices, and it adds analytics which is, frankly, better than anything any vendor out there has in terms of introspection of potential and actual bottlenecks. A couple of things you lose in terms of features vs plain-ole zfs (for now) are: the ability to keep a different number of snapshots on secondary vs primary and the ability to have different options on the toplevel zfs filesystem (e.g. compression on secondary but not primary). A final note: Fishworks replication is not compatible with regular zfs replication. They have extended it into the appliance to add support for real-time options that have not been committed back yet, though they likely will be. Fishworks will lead the OpenSolaris commit backs in terms of some features, and possibly fall behind in terms of others. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
