Hi Sam Wow, you've got one hell of a CEO there, congrats :)
> Here is the vision: > -Solaris 10 running software RAID/ZFS2 managing 8 > drives at first with room for expansion Please go through the zfs project under the projects section on this site. For this setup you won't need to read much, but for future planning there are some general guidelines in the docs there. Do go through the zfs-discuss archives. > -I'm under the impression that ZFS2 is similar to RAID6. Yes, zfs raidz2 is similar to raid6. It removes the "write hole" and problems associated with it (lack of atomicity, nvram, battery backed cache etc). > -All it needs to do is serve files to a windows machine (SMB). There is good ol' samba and also the new integrated CIFS server. Give them a shot. Integrated CIFS is new in OpenSolaris. Give the latest build a spin and let us know how the testing went. > The hardware: > -I have a 4U rack case which I plan on jamming full > of discs, a mini-ATX board (4xSATAII ports) and a > PCIe 8x Raid card (8xSATAII ports). Be really careful with HW. OpenSolaris can deal with flaky HW but it doesn't really like it. I'd suggest looking at HCL on BigAdmin and the HW detection tool 2.0. If you can, get one of the Sun Ultras. They're cheap, certified and peace of mind. Oh and for serious NAS, give plenty of ram to ZFS. 2-4 gigs should suffice and make SURE you run it on a 64 bit machine!!! > -Solaris will run on a 60GB IDE drive Make it two for redundancy. Use either ZFS boot or old SVM, both will work nicely. ZFS boot is new, so you might need to get familiar with it. > -I'm putting 8x500GB SataII drives on the Raid card > as JBOD so Solaris can manage the discs in ZFS2 > -Likely add 2x750GB SataII drives on the > motherboard's sata ports shortly. > -There will also be a 400GB alone and two 200GB in > RAID1 but they won't be part of the ZFS2 mount. I'd suggest having upgrade points at "similar config" levels (short of the right word). Basically, upgrade in 8 disc increments so today you have- zool create raidz2 c1... c2... ..... later you add another raidz2 array in identical way. Have dissimilar types of arrays if you really feel so. ZFS doesn't have problems with it, but I feel that it just makes the tasks of documenting the config and keeping it all in head difficult. Each type has its own pros and cons, so experiment and settle for one that might serve you well for an year or two. For simple NAS, I feel simple stripes of raidz2 will suffice. boot-pool --- mirror ------ discs A & B data-pool-raidz2 ---raidz2 -------- discs 0-7 (with spare??) ---raidz2 -------- discs 8-15 (with spare??) (in future) --- raidz2 -------- discs 16-23 (with spare) data-pool-high-IO (mirror of stripes) --- mirror ------ discs 0-N ------ discs N+1 - 2N-1 HTH - Akhilesh This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
