Re: [zfs-discuss] Securing a risky situation with zfs

[Dan Pritts]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 01:20:14AM -0800, Gabriele Bulfon wrote:

> The basic idea was to have a zfs mirror of each iscsi disk on
> scsi-attached disks, so that in case of another panic of the SAN,
> everything should still work on the scsi-attached disks.

> My questions are:
> - is this a good idea?

it's a better idea than just trusting your flaky SAN.

> - should I use zfs mirrors or normal solaris mirrors?

ZFS gives you the big advantage of on-the-fly data checksumming; 
that's very helpful compared to disksuite mirrors.

> - is mirroring the best performance, or should I use zfs raid-z?

mirroring is almost always going to give you the best performance.

> - is there any other possibility I don't see?

call the comcast hammer lady [1] and ask her to come take care
of your SAN.

> - The SAN includes 2 Sun-Solaris-10 machines, and 3 windows
> machinesis there any similar solution on the win machines?

none that i'm aware of; windows does have software mirroring, of 
course.  Make lots of backups :).  



danno
--
Dan Pritts, System Administrator
Internet2
office: +1-734-352-4953 | mobile: +1-734-834-7224

[1] 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702359.html

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[zfs-discuss] Securing a risky situation with zfs

[Gabriele Bulfon]

Hi,
we're having a bad situation with a SAN iScsi solution in a production 
environment of a customer: the storage hardware may panic its kernel because of 
its software fault, with the risk of loosing data.
We want to give the SAN manufacturer a last chance of correcting their 
solution: we're going to move data from the SAN to new fresh scsi-attached 
disks, for the time needed for them to find the bugs. Once they've certified us 
the solution, we will move back the data onto the SAN.
Here comes the issue: we can't risk our customer's data to be again on a 
possibly faulty SAN, so we were thinking about reusing the scsi-attached disks 
as part of the zfs pool of the SAN partitions.
The basic idea was to have a zfs mirror of each iscsi disk on scsi-attached 
disks, so that in case of another panic of the SAN, everything should still 
work on the scsi-attached disks.
My questions are:
- is this a good idea?
- should I use zfs mirrors or normal solaris mirrors?
- is mirroring the best performance, or should I use zfs raid-z?
- is there any other possibility I don't see?
Last but not least (I know the question is not pertinent, but maybe you can 
help):
- The SAN includes 2 Sun-Solaris-10 machines, and 3 windows machinesis 
there any similar solution on the win machines?

Thanx for any help
Gabriele Bulfon.
 
 
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