Questions I don't know answers to are omitted. "I am but a nestling."
On 5/31/07, Nathan Huisman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
===== STORAGE REQUIREMENTS 5-10tb of redundant fairly high speed storage
What does "high speed" mean? How many users are there for this system? Are they accessing it via Ethernet? FC? Something else? Why the emphasis on iscsi?
===== QUESTION #2 Can ZFS be exported via iscsi and then imported as a disk to a linux system and then be formated with another file system[?]
Yes. It's in OpenSolaris but not (as I understand it) in Solaris direct from Sun. If running OpenSolaris isn't an issue (but it probably is) it works out of the box.
===== QUESTION #3 How does zfs handle a bad drive? What process must I go through in order to take out a bad drive and replace it with a good one?
ZFS only notices drives are dead when they're really dead - they can't be opened. If a drive is causing intermittent problems (returning bad data and so forth) it won't get noticed, but ZFS will recover the blocks from mirrors or parity. "zpool replace" should take care of the replacement procedure, or you could keep hot spares online. I can't comment on hotswapping drives while the machine is on; does this work in general, or require special hardware?
===== QUESTION #4 What is a good way to back up this HA storage unit? Snapshots will provide an easy way to do it live, but should it be dumped into a tape library, or an third offsite zfs pool using zfs send/recieve or ?
ZFS will be no help if all you've got is iscsi targets. You need something that knows what those targets hold; whatever client-OS-based stuff you use other places will do. Otherwise you end up storing/backing up a lot more than you need to - filesystem metadata, et cetera.
===== QUESTION #5 Does the following setup work? BOX 1 (JBOD) -> iscsi export -> BOX 2 ZFS. In other words, can I setup a bunch of thin storage boxes with low cpu and ram instead of using sas or fc to supply the jbod to the zfs server?
As Dale mentions, this seems overly complicated. Consuming iscsi and producing "different" iscsi doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Will _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
