List:
How about a ZFS demo day ?
On Feb 28, Moinak and I presented at MVIT, a college close to the
Bengaluru International Airport.
Though we intended to present many things related to Belenix, a major
chunk of our presentation comprised of ZFS related demos. There was
even a moment when Moinak delete 14 GB of data from my laptop's home
folder and then we recovered all that back within seconds :)
There were a number of questions from people on ZFS. The mystifying
bits were about whether snapshots are backups or not, how rollbacks
work, etc.
Moinak and I offered to the students there that we could conduct a
session dedicated to ZFS.
I've jotted down somethings that we could do:
- Instant backups
- Reverting backups
- Exchanging backups with other computers and users
- Adding space without worrying about partitions
- Instant partitions/formatting
- Sharing files on the network
- Automatic compression of storage
- Backing up your files/file systems regularly
Server side storage made easy
- Reliable storage using cheap disks
- How reliable is 'reliable' ?
- How to add terabytes of data without storage slowdowns
(this is a problem with conventional SAN storage servers)
- Sharing files with users
- Portable file systems for users
- Reduce duplication using snapshots and clones
- Increasing reliability of snapshots and clones (what if one disk fails!?)
- ZFS based home directories and Delegated Administration - ZFS for all !
Virtualization fun
- VirtualBox - Multiple Guest Instances, lesser storage
- Connecting with VMWare ESXi for free Virtualization
- Running Linux apps with ZFS based storage
Somethings that I've not tried enough to be able to showcase:
- iSCSI - High speed storage for Windows, Linux, OSX and Solaris
machines - your own network drive, and with the file system of your
choice
- Antivirus Scanning - Server side antivirus scanning of all files
(except on iSCSI file systems, where the file system is owned by the
consumer rather than the storage server).
- Linux inside a Zone (zones need some fixing on Belenix, but we could
use OpenSolaris 2008.11 for this in case Belenix is not fixed on time)
-- Sriram
