Robert Milkowski wrote:
I don't know if ZFS MAN pages should teach people about RAID.
If somebody doesn't understand RAID basics then some kind of tool
where you just specify pool of disk and have to choose from: space
efficient, performance, non-redundant and that's it - all the rest
will be hidden.
Actually, this would be really nice to put into some sort of a low-level
CLI tool, ala "mdadm" for linux. That is, a nice little tool that
presents you with a list of drives, allows you to select which ones
you'd like to put into a ZFS pool, then lets you select from a couple of
different options based on performance/space/redundancy. It would also
prompt for answers to some of the common options. Figure a nice little
perl/python script, or even a Borne-shell script would be sufficient.
Target audience would be non-sysadmin folks, plus entry-level admins.
Also, on another note: adding drives to a RAIDZ[2] isn't that
important for enterprise folks with massive disk arrays, since creating
new pools (or adding to a stripe RAIDZs) is the most likely action when
acquiring new disk space.
However, adding to a RAIDZ is really, really, really common action in
the mid-size and small-size business, as well as at the department
level for enterprises. These people tend to have setups of a couple of
dozen disks at best, but do occasionally either add single disks or
rarely add a whole disk shelf. Migrating data for these folks is a
royal pain (they generally don't have the super-experienced staff, or
their staff is severely overworked), so it would be really nice to
provide them with this functionality.
Given that the x64 stuff is now a huge part of Sun's business, and that
we're selling large chunks of them to mid-size companies or large
companies for department/remote office use, we should definitely
consider this target audience as at least equal to our traditional
enterprise market in terms of feature priority.
:-)
-Erik
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